Hyperion
by Myurra-K
Summary: Rick's caught in a web, trapped between his troubled son and the unintentional distance he's put between himself and the others by picking up a shovel instead of a gun. Rick/Daryl
1. Helios

**Hyperion**

_Part I_  
_Helios_

.:.

They say too much of a good thing is a bad thing. As Rick understands it now, it's the same as saying too much light blinds you and commits you to darkness indefinitely. Looking upon brightness might strain your vision in reminiscent smears and trails of colour, but when it recedes you are still left with not but an ordinary sight. You have glimpsed something you cannot unsee, and now you know how it stings to look upon it, but my oh my, the temptation is there. And so is the risk of blindness.

When the world spiraled down the drain, they were all too blinded to see they could not detain water with their fingers.

A rare few were not so stranded by their lives suddenly tossed up in the air; no idea where they landed, only that they landed together.

Daryl Dixon was one of these people, with sharp eyes that shied from the sun, a nocturnal predator whose feline vision reflected back at Rick through the night. Daryl's life had not been laden with luxury, well aware of what darkness could bring. There were many people whose eyes were closed from the destruction when Rick found them - Shane, Lori, Dale, Hershel...

Daryl's eyes were wide open, bright and seeing, gleaming combustion blue. The light came from within, watching Rick and their kinship take form. Rick held out hope for the sake of his family, but inside he was just the same as Daryl; nobody was coming for them, nobody would save them. They had to save themselves, and those that didn't learn how would not survive.

And then Rick was burned, a supernova so bright it left his mind white for days. Two months later and he can still remember the last chance to reconcile with his wife going up in flames, still dreams of it like it was only yesterday he saw her face dim with grief.

Nothing's been the same since.

.:.

* * *

The first time they played the game, it wasn't even a game. It was just Rick opening up, and to his surprise, Daryl did as well, trying to encourage him with a rare moment of outward empathy.

"_Lori hated peppermints,"_ Rick confided seemingly out of nowhere, the words pulled from his mouth like they were pierced with a hook and trawled straight from his tongue. Four of them went on the run today, and somewhere in the second story of the house Glenn and Maggie were shoving satchels full of supplies - or fucking, but that was their business - while he and Daryl stayed on the lower level. They were staying closer to one another than usual, having had a bit of a struggle in the foyer, an old and partially mummified walker waking from whatever stasis the unstimulated dead fell into and lunging for Rick's unsuspecting trachea.

The house was split-leveled, masquerading as four floors instead of two. The lowest point of the house was only three adjoined rooms, one of which was a modern kitchen with one hell of a pantry system. On the island bench, several packets of unopened peppermints sat as though they'd just been tossed without care.

"_I always loved them, but Lori hated any kind of mint. She had this awful thing about toothpaste,"_ he says with a laugh.

The look on Daryl's face is, at first, like he didn't really care, but Rick watches it change into something softer and much more understanding. Without a word, the man turns away and starts raiding the cupboards, making a sound of pleasant surprise to find how full they were. Large gaps marked the places on the shelves where some of the inhabitants had clearly packed their favourites and evacuated as soon as possible, leaving behind this large house and whoever that was that tried to rip out Rick's throat. There was still plenty left over, the kinds of foods Rick had been missing. Daryl tosses him a can of pears with a smirk on his face, one that was completely justified by the satisfaction on Rick's.

They're packing their winnings into their own bags when Rick grabs a bag of the mints, and Daryl pauses zipping up his pack to watch him. After some deliberate staring, Daryl scoops up one of the other packets and shoves it in his own bag through the gap left by the partially open zipper.

"_I love berries," _Daryl says gruffly, not meeting Rick's imploring stare, _"lived off 'em when I got lost in tha woods as a kid. Kinda got a soft spot for 'em now."_

It was as simple as that. Just two small confessions, things they never knew about one another before this trip. Rick doubts he'd have ever learned Daryl's penchant for sweet and sour fruits if he'd never said anything about the peppermints. Once he might not have even appreciated the small bit of knowledge.

So when they come across a mulberry tree on the next run without Daryl, Rick doesn't even mind the purple stains on his fingers, just plucks as many of the ripe little fruits as he can manage in the space of five minutes, wraps them up in the bandanna shoved in his pocket, and takes them back to the prison for Daryl. The hunter gave him the most bewildered thankyou Rick's ever heard in his life.

The second time was more for the sake of simply talking, as he and Daryl were on their own. They were looting through a bunch of retirement units, looking for a prosthetic leg. Their chances of finding one were slim, particularly one that would be Hershel's size, but something was better than nothing. If they had to watch the old man hobbling around on crutches for much longer Daryl would make good on his threat to carve the man a peg leg himself.

They'd had to clear out each unit they came across, both sickly reminded of the retirees in Atlanta, where the staff and families had picked up and just left all the seniors for dead. By the time they came to the fourth house, both men were bloodied and had the same drawn look in their eyes before opening the door, deciding with a nod that Rick would take this one.

After cracking what he was almost sure was an old woman's skull open with his knife, they started immediately searching through the rooms. The half-eaten corpse of a shitzu was fouling the air perhaps more than the walker herself, and from the state of her arms and legs it looked as though the dog had been gnawing on her before she bit back. Rick wasn't all that masterful in hiding his reaction to tastes and even worse when it came to smells, but Daryl was usually as stoic as though he didn't even have a sense of it. But this time, even Daryl gagged and covered his mouth and nose with the bandanna from his back pocket.

Still they had no luck. They did, however, find a bible when Daryl tripped over it and almost crashed into the closest wall. A sneer picked his upper lip. _"Oh, good. Nice to know whose side the Almighty's on,"_ he snorts, kicking the bible with steel cap of his boot like it'd consciously sought to get under his feet.

Rick suddenly recalled something he'd yet to tell the hunter. Yet to tell many people, in fact. _"I was almost converted as a kid,"_ Rick tells the other man, and at Daryl's unimpressed look he decides to explain. _"I went to a youth group with a Christian girl I was tryin' to impress. It was so intense, and the preachers were young. They were just kids, not pastors or anything. I almost let myself believe it, hell I even prayed."_

_"What'd you pray for?"_

_"That she'd go on a proper date with me."_

The brief laughter Daryl gives in reply is infectious, but they both regret it when they cop lungfuls of decrepit air. Coughing, Daryl gestures for them to leave with a wave of his hand, then slaps Rick on the shoulder as they're passing through the front door again.

"_So, was she worth it?"_ She wasn't, but rather than tell Daryl that, he tries to lie without saying a word, and when the hunter spots Rick's leering look he smirks. _"Nice. Yeah, I was raised Catholic."_

_"Really?"_

_"Yeah, for a while. First school I went to was taught by nuns 'n shit. Y'know, when I actually showed up. Gotta tell ya, man, them nun's are vicious. Got dragged by tha ear a few times."_

_"No shit."_

_"Pro'ly shouldn't have been makin' planes outta the hymns at mass."_

To their surprise, they eventually find a prosthetic leg. Took it off a walker in fact, one that was dragging itself along the ground with the leg half strapped on and scraping along the linoleum floor of a kitchen. The conversation died as abruptly as it began, but at least they weren't staring balefully at one another in front of each new door.

And so began their little tradition. I share, you share. Rick always started, and Daryl always played along, whether it was because he genuinely wanted to talk about his life or because he knew Rick needed to have that kind of normalcy. They spoke of whatever was on Rick's mind that day. It probably took Daryl a little longer than Rick to pick up on their pattern, but even still he continued to open up bit by bit about his life, and Rick got the chance to talk to someone who was willing to listen.

Until two months after everything settled down at the prison, Hershel convinced Rick to stay inside the gates and give up going on runs.

In a way, he also gave up Daryl for a time. He just didn't realise it at first.

.:.

* * *

His days became a conveyor-belt of the same motions, the same settings on default. Judith, Carl, the crops, the animals, eat, and sleep. Day in, day out, no burdens, no stress, just the time to find himself and let his boy do the same.

Patrick was a normal kid despite all that had happened. Carl was not. He wonders how he'd have dealt with his son in the old world, if he come across the same psychopathic tendencies that were buried beneath this Carl's skin, before when he was near two years younger and a hell of a lot more innocent to the violence, of the world and mankind both. Considering the kind of man he himself was before all this started, perhaps a little too innocent himself, he'd probably have just cried. Carl was his beloved son, and quite possibly the only exception to the laws he held over all men's heads.

If anyone else in the group frightened him the way his son did, he's not entirely sure he'd have relied on farming to fix it.

Parenting was hard, and there was no rulebook handed down generation to generation – _aside from the ones some parents wrote into their children's skins with fists and belts and electrical cords_ – telling them how to and not to parent. When Rick was a new father, holding his week-old son, he was still under the impression there was only two true factors in how you choose to raise your child; how you were raised, and how your partner was raised. You might choose to be everything like your own parents, or everything opposite.

There was so much more to it than that.

It's what you are and are not capable of doing. It's what you need to do to ensure they are human – you need to discipline a child that does something wrong, morally guide them long the right paths against prejudice and righteousness and the falsities told by others. You need to provide for them, because they are your responsibility. Love them, because they are yours.

And what Rick has just now discovered, a part of parenting that had so far always fallen under some other section of the sliding scale. One of the biggest steps in parenting was determining what your child needed from you in order to grow. Letting your child subliminally dictate how you raise them was perhaps the hardest lesson Rick had to learn, and he learned it through the basset-hound eyes of Hershel telling him his thirteen-year-old son had just gunned a boy down in cold blood.

He learned it through those same eyes telling him he needed to stay, to stop chasing his demons beyond the fence. His son needed his guidance, and Rick needed to be grounded again.

Of course, it was seeing the contrast of Patrick against his own son that really hit home base, and finally everything that'd been said to him over the year; by Lori, Carol, Hershel, and hell even Daryl's backhand comments; everything all just fell into place. Carl needed his presence here, not as a leader but as a father.

So he gave it as much as possible.

He forgot others were used to his presence, and others were quite unsatisfied with the lack of explanation he'd given them. To them, he was just tired, looking for an escape and a chance to rest. In truth, Rick was trying to save his son. And maybe he was trying to save himself in the process.

.:.

* * *

Just as it always did, the sight of Daryl near the entrance of the prison made Rick stop what he was doing. Part of it is a sense of longing, regret for the close company he'd lost, and for the gap of communication that had formed between them in the past two months. Moreover there's the perspective he's gained by staying here in the safety of the prison, and sometimes he just wants to grab Daryl by the shoulders and tell him "let somebody else go". Sometimes he feels like taking the keys to the bike, saying "it's safer in here, stay here, why do you always have to be the one to leave?"

Then there were the times when Daryl and Michonne would take off for days. They started coming back making jokes and horsing around, and Rick watched from the outside in as a friendship was formed in the outside world.

The parallels between how he and Daryl grew closer, to how Daryl and Michonne did, bothered him somehow.

One day he almost went on another run. Michonne had been off by herself for about two days already. Daryl and Sasha were taking some new guys, people who had spent most of the first year in a bomb shelter and hadn't carved their own way like the rest of them, out to get them used to defending themselves. They were climbing the fences, Carol had told him jokingly, so Daryl decided to go give them a taste of reality and remind them why it was better to be cooped up in here than free out there.

He envisioned the three men as leaves ready to be blown away in the first breeze, let alone the gale they'll likely be tossed into by the scruffs of their necks. It really all depended on Daryl's mood, the size of the danger he was likely to put them in.

But it wasn't those three strangers Rick was worried about. It was Daryl.

He had Sasha for backup, but when there were three cocky idiots to look after, chances were he wasn't going to get much help out there if they came across a real problem.

He almost drops the spade in his hand. He almost tosses his gloves into the dirt and climbs into the empty seat of the car. He almost calls out to Daryl as the man rides the bike past.

"Hey, Dad, I got your fertilizer," Carl calls out to him, strolling down the hill with a thumb tucked into his belt loop and with a plastic container in the other hand. Rick hears the gates open to let the vehicles pass through, and gives his son a reluctant smile.

.:.

* * *

"_I never used to get nightmares,"_ Rick wraps the thick, slightly scratchy blanket over his shoulders and tucks his feet up onto the sunken couch he'd claimed for his own. Daryl is still by the window, peering through the blinds down the overgrown driveway of the old farmhouse.

It reminded them both a lot of Hershel's farm, but this house was much smaller and so was the property. They'd been lucky enough to find a few scraps left over in the cupboard, but the better find was the fertilized eggs in the half-destroyed chicken coup. The rooster had clearly been having a marvelous time, and with the wire of the pen broken open, probably from one predator or another, the chickens had been free to find their own food, returning only to roost and brood.

But that was all beyond the point.

"_I mean, I probably did, but nothing like now. I wake up and I remember it all."_

Daryl is still prying the blinds apart, but Rick can see he's staring at the timber sill, lost in thought or listening Rick can't be sure. They were stuck here until morning. Driving at night was risky and after having broken down once on the road after darkness fell, and subsequently losing two people when they'd stupidly tried to fix the problem with torches and penlights and all eyes under the hood instead of their surroundings, it was the rule to try and hunker down and wait for daylight.

"_What do _you_ dream about?"_ Daryl asks eventually, and Rick knows the question's not for his sake but Daryl's own. He lets go of the blinds and they sit crooked, a gap that Rick compulsively wants to fix. Daryl strokes his fingers downward over the blinds, righting them, and he relaxes.

"_Failure."_

Daryl's combustion blue eyes glint, and he knows the hunter's finally looking at him. He pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders, digs his toes into the gap between the seat cushions, and recalls the last nightmare that sliced behind his eyelids and drove daggers into his heart, a writhing mass of callous rage barbed and thorned.

"_Shane, and Lori, Sophia, Andrea...Merle."_ At that last, Daryl crosses his arms, leaning back against the wall beside the window, but Rick can't tell if it means he's listening or if he's tuned out._"Sometimes the prison walls crumble, just like that,"_ he clicks his fingers, "_we're all just standing there in the rubble, and walkers just come crawling out of the woods all over. We all just stand there. None of us do a god damn thing."_

"_You know that wouldn't happen,"_ Daryl says quietly, his gritty voice a low timbre of sympathy. Rick doesn't know if Daryl's talking about the prison collapsing or about whether or not they'd just let themselves die.

"_I had this one dream; you and I, we were up in a deer stand. I had the sight lined up and just when I pulled the trigger, you pushed me out of it. When I was falling, I could see Carl where I thought I shot the deer, falling too. There was no deer. I shot my son. I was lying there, watching Carl die, but all I could think about was how you pushed me out of that tree."_

"_That's fucked up,"_ Daryl agreed.

Death they could handle, but not so much the twisted things their minds came up with during their sleep, things like the unfeeling cold while watching his son die, and the stoicism in the face of walkers swarming them in the ruins of their home...things that couldn't possibly be real yet they felt them so vividly. He'd felt the cold pit in his stomach at the betrayal that never happened, and woken knowing it not to be real, shaking at the empty feeling in his chest and the memory of the blood spilling from Carl's eyes, nose, and mouth.

"_Do you have dreams like that?"_ Rick asks, even though he knows the answer is yes before Daryl says a word.

"_Sometimes. It's usually the same things over an' over."_

"_What do you dream about?"_

He shrugs against the wall. _"There's one I've had a few times,"_ he reluctantly admits, and it's the longest minute before he continues that Rick believes he wont, _"Lori miscarried in her sleep, and Judith ate her way out. Everyone treated her like she was still a little girl, and that first time I fed her, I gave her my hand instead of a bottle."_

Rick feels a little sick at the thought of it.

"_We all kept doin' it, too. Feedin' her bits an' pieces, 'til there weren't nothin' left."_

They end up sleeping upright on opposite ends of the couch, their feet pressed together for warmth in the crease between the cushions. The bedrooms reeked of the dead, but there were still two couches and plenty of space to both stretch out, yet they chose not to. That night, Rick dreams of Judith with glassy moon pupils and bloodied gums, and Daryl's avoidant eyes when he shakes Rick awake at first light tells him he knew.

.:.

* * *

"We don't talk anymore," Rick 'observes' while he's standing at Daryl's back, watching the crouched hunter skinning rabbits like he was born to do it.

"Yeah, well, you ain't around much no more," Daryl grouses, tears the skin off a rabbit in two halves with his hands, the pinks and purples of the flesh underneath striking Rick as rather disgusting no matter how many times he's seen it.

"Technically I'm right here," Rick points out, "you're the one always jumping on the chance to run out those gates."

Daryl tosses the rabbit onto the pile of two other skinned, macabre corpses, and stabs the knife between the ribs of the next one. He turns on his feet without standing, bloodied hands on his knees, and _glares_. "You tryin'a pick a fight?"

"I'm trying to have a conversation."

"Well it looks like you ain't that well practiced at it," Daryl tells him, "maybe you should try again tomorrow."

Rick sighs, joins the hunter in a crouch on the concrete of the yard, noticing the way Daryl's eyes trace him like there were words written in the lines of his face. "If I could be out there with you, I would."

"Don't see no shackles," Daryl grumbles, but an expression swifts across his face and he gives a loose shrug, waving Rick's direction with a red hand. "Doesn't matter, you earned a break. Take all the time you need, ya damn hippy. Just come on back to us one of these days."

He doesn't quite know how to explain he hasn't lost his mind. Rather, he's trying to find it, and help his son do the same. _It shouldn't be that hard_, he thinks, _we're all killers here._

Daryl isn't like him. Daryl doesn't understand.

Ironic; the softer-hearted of the two of them was the man currently sawing a rabbit's head from it's neck.

.:.

* * *

Maggie's kneeling in the forest that was supposedly the front lawn of the cottage when Rick meets the others outside. Glenn's picking through the grass, and Daryl's standing back following a walker in the distance with the notched arrow in his loaded crossbow. The walker was too far off for Daryl to bother wasting an shot on it, so he was entertaining himself then.

The sound of grass snapping when Glenn yanks something from the overgrown plant bed. He passes it to Maggie, a small white daisy, and she cuts into the stem with her thumbnail.

"_What're you doing?"_ Rick asks, slipping the gym bag onto the veranda by his feet. Maggie cranes her head back, smiling at him, but there's a wariness in her eyes.

"_Making Beth a crown,"_ she shrugs. They all hear Daryl scoff, but neither Glenn nor Maggie pay any mind to it. Glenn's already carding through the grass and bristly weeds, looking for a new flower for his fiance's little arts-and-crafts excursion. _Country girls,_ Rick thinks to himself with a shake of his head.

Rick decides to leave them to it, hauls the strap of the bag over his opposite shoulder and heads off toward the car to pack the last of their bags, knowing Daryl will eventually follow him. He's already shuffling things around in the trunk of the car to make the last bag fit by the time Daryl reaches him.

"_I'm guessing Merle never made you any daisy-chain necklaces?"_ Rick asks, sounding serious even though he was far from it.

Daryl throws his weight back against the side of the car near Rick, staring at Maggie and Glenn with a look of utter vexation. _"Why the hell are they tryin'a pull tha wool over that girl's eyes? She should be out here with us, watchin' her sister's back. Not walkin' 'round with flowers in her hair an' cozyin' up to that new kid."_

"_Beth's helping in her own way."_

"_She's weak,"_ Daryl mutters, _"everyone's keepin' her that way."_

"_You can't resent her for being the way she is,"_ Rick says, leaving the trunk of the car open for the moment, worried the slam of it closing would have Glenn and Maggie coming over before anybody was ready. _"She's young."_

"_So's yer boy,"_ Daryl points out, but doesn't go the extra step of reminding Rick of the life his son had taken, or of the countless death he'd seen.

"_Some people just don't have a mean bone in their body."_

"_And Carl does?"_

Rick almost drops the conversation right there, in fact he surprises himself when he doesn't. _"Yeah, Carl does. You know he does." _Daryl is unreadable, as he often is, but he's staring at Rick openly, perhaps purposely neutral, and Rick is quick to take the opportunity to talk about his son without being reminded that he should be doing something about it, never given an answer as to what exactly he was supposed to do. _"To tell you the truth, he scares me sometimes."_

"_I think he scares himself, too,"_ Daryl says, and just like that the conversation shifts, but still Rick can't help but wonder why Daryl thought so. _"Used to bring my mom flowers,"_ Daryl murmurs. _"Picked 'em out in the woods every time I was out there alone. She had a vase in the kitchen where she'd put them, then one day she and my old man were getting' into a howler an' she threw the vase at him and broke it. The next day there it was on the sill, back in one piece."_

Rick was smiling until he realised Daryl wasn't.

"_When she died, I started picking every one I saw, just leaving 'em there to die."_

"_Daryl-"_

"_One day I got this idea, if I could just set them on fire then they wouldn't grow back. Took nearly starting a forest fire to realise something was fucken wrong. Just 'cause I never started that fire, don't mean I wasn't messed up. With kids, it can start so fucking small, man."_

Rick doesn't realise until later, when they're back at the prison and Maggie's dumped a multi-coloured daisy-chain crown on her sister's golden head, and everyone's having a grand old time except Carl sharpening his new knife in the background, that it was Daryl's way of giving him a warning.

Nearly two weeks later, he leaves his gun in his cell and follows Hershel's lead.

.:.

* * *

"You ain't forgotten how to use one of those, have you?" Daryl asks him, lingering in the doorway to his cell, and Rick feels a similar exhaustion to how he used to feel when Lori began nagging on him. He lowers the gun to his lap, rests his hands over it, feels the metal of his python cold against his palms.

"No, I ain't forgotten," Rick sighs.

Any other time Daryl might've already left, or he might've stayed in the doorway for whatever chat they're obviously about to have, but he takes a few steps inside and Rick thinks he looks like he doesn't quite know where to go from there.

So he tries to help. "Something on your mind?"

"Yeah," the man murmurs, scratching the back of his neck, "I meant it when I said you earned some time off."

"I know."

"But just 'cause you ain't got time for nobody but yer peas-"

"-hey, what?"

Daryl's glaring again, bad cat bearing a grudge. "You heard me."

"Yeah, mind explaining what I heard?"

Daryl peers out the doorway like he's considering it as an escape route. "You wanna hide away in here, fine. You wanna give up your place in tha chain of command, fine. But don't shut people out. Last I checked, peas don't talk back."

Apparently Rick doesn't either, or at least not in any time frame Daryl deemed appropriate for conversation. The man lingered for a moment, waiting for a reply that Rick didn't give, and left as abruptly as he came, leaving ghosts of words on Rick's lips and a desolation in his chest. It didn't make sense at first, not in the way it should've.

He forgets his gun, half pulled to pieces in his lap.

That afternoon he finds Daryl out in the yard, working the wrench deep in the motor of one of the cars. Wordlessly, he hands the man the rubber hose when he's asked for it, smiling a little at the look of surprise on Daryl's face when the man realises who was giving him a hand – obviously not who was expected. He must have stood there for about ten minutes, watching Daryl's arms flexing and glistening in the late afternoon sun, before he gathers the courage.

"I still talk to Lori sometimes," he offers. Curiously, Daryl stops moving beneath the hood, braced on his arms and still. Always so still, the way he always goes when Rick starts to talk, when he's truly starting to listen. "About all kinds of things. Told her how Judith's grown, and...about how Carl's getting better now..."

Combustion blue eyes turn to him, half-hidden by the shadows of steel, caged behind sweated locks of hair criss-crossing his brow. The look he gives Rick is intense, like awareness and apology and satisfaction at once.

_Finally,_ he thinks, _finally he gets it. _

"Bet she's proud," Daryl offers quietly, not elaborating who she'd be proud of, whether of Carl or of Judith, or maybe even of Rick himself.

"She probably would be," Rick says, rather than 'she is', because Daryl needs to be reassured Rick knows the distinction between reality and illusion.

Daryl nods, watches Rick for another moment while he taps each of his fingers in succession against the metal of the car, then turns back to the dirty, greasy engine. He doesn't offer up a revelation of his own. Instead, he clears his throat softly, holds a hand backwards without looking Rick's way, and says "bring me the torch."

.:.

* * *

"_What's that?"_ Rick asks, leaning over Daryl's shoulder, seeing him fiddling with something around the old walker's neck. It tangles in the wiry white hairs of the corpse's beard, but Daryl yanks it free, tugging at the coils of dead hair from the chain in his fingers. A plain silver cross dangles from the end, caught on the clasp. Rick snorts. _"Thought you weren't religious?"_

"_I ain't, but just 'cause I think it's a load of crap, don't mean the ol' man don't still believe,"_ Daryl explains offhandedly, carelessly shoving the cross in his pocket. _"His broke a few weeks back, thought I'd keep an eye out for a new one for 'im."_

"_Mighty kind of you."_

"_Ain't nothin',"_ Daryl shrugs, lifting the crossbow onto his shoulder as he does so. Ahead of them, Tyreese is distracted chatting up a woman, Karen her name was. They've got time.

"_You make jokes about religion, yet I ain't never heard you say a word against Hershel,"_ Rick ponders aloud, catching the blank look Daryl shoots him and searching for a hint buried in its depths.

"_Some people need to believe in god. I ain't one of 'em, an' neither are you. Hershel is. He don't believe 'cause a piece of tail told 'im to, or 'cause his momma told him to, he just does. A man finds peace with himself through god, then good for him."_

"_He doesn't believe quite like he used to,"_ Rick says, remembering watching the pieces of that faith crumble with his own eyes.

"_No, he doesn't,"_ Daryl agrees, heading off in the direction of Tyreese and Karen, Rick on his heels, _"but he's still convinced there's a purpose to all this."_

"_Are you?"_

"_What, like fate?"_ Daryl scoffs, but when he turns to look at Rick, the scorn melts off his face in layers _"...maybe. Guess we'll just have to wait 'n see."_

.:.

* * *

The first time there is a kiss, they're simmering over hot coals from the raw liquor Daryl's brought with him onto watch, and it's not even nightfall yet but they've been drinking anyway. The sun is still bleeding violently over the west horizon, marmalade light painting the floor of the guard tower through the windows above their heads, sat back against the walls and watching the dust in the air glitter around them. When they first started, the sunlight was still clipping the metal eyelets of their boots, but now the shadows had soared beyond their feet and the air is feeling almost cold in urging to press them closer together. They're talking about everything and nothing, trade after trade, and for a time he feels like this is a victory, because just a few days ago Daryl was pissed at him and now they're sharing a watch.

"My first kiss," Rick mumbles, still thankfully coherent, "was with a girl called Janet...Janet _something_, can't remember."

Daryl snorts, hands him the dark bottle, but Rick doesn't take a sip straight away, picking at the corner of the label instead.

"It was down behind the old metal slide at school. We were eight? No, nine. She had a cold, and I got sick after."

When Rick still doesn't take a sip, Daryl snatches the bottle back and takes a swig himself, coughing when it goes down hard.

"What about you?" Rick asks, taking the bottle back before Daryl could take a second sip, bringing the rim to his lips. He idly realizes the glass is damp from Daryl's mouth, but he doesn't care.

"What _about _me?"

"Who was your first kiss? You..._have_ been kissed, right?"

"Jesus fucking_ Christ_, o'course I have. And it ain't none of yer business."

"Why not?" Rick asks, realises he's been slouching when Daryl stares down at him a certain way and picks himself back up. Maybe he ended up sitting a little closer to the man than before, but it was starting to get cold now that the sun was almost set. The guard tower was a damn sauna midday in summer, but winter nights were terribly cold. "I told you mine," Rick tells him.

"Fine...seven, with my cousin – you say one damn word 'bout rednecks-"

"I hear you," Rick snickers, waving his hand at the man, "not a word."

"...never met one another before. Birthday of some asshole on my ma's side of tha family. The adults all got a good laugh out of it, and I only saw her once after that so it was never weird, 'cept when Merle brought it up."

_At least she wasn't your sister,_ he almost says, but he's pretty sure Daryl would break the bottle over his head if he had the gall to say that aloud.

"So, then, who was the_ last_ person you kissed?" Rick asks, tipping the bottle against his lower lip, accidentally chinking glass on teeth.

Daryl gives him a funny look, "now that really ain't yer business", and takes the bottle from Rick's slippery grip as soon as he gets a mouthful, turning the bottle up in the fading light to observe the label.

Rick, with his tongue still sizzling from the alcohol, catches the faint smile on Daryl's usually scowling mouth as he reads the back of the bottle - tries to, at least, but then again his eyes are better than Rick's by a long shot so maybe even three-quarters to sloshed he can make out the fine print.

He wanted his question answered, so he figures he'd get the answer himself; giving in to impulse, he leans over and seeks that smiling mouth with his own.

He's almost certain he was only aiming for chaste, but then Daryl kisses him back - though perhaps it was the shock of the unexpected than an act of will – and Rick loses himself for a while, a pleasant tingle that might not have been the booze. His beard and Daryl's newly trimmed facial hair feels strange brushing together. Daryl's lips are firmer than Lori's ever were and just as tangy as his own with the added flavour of nicotine. Cigarette smoke, alcohol, and the musk of the man so familiar to him now catches in his nose.

Rick moves away, expecting some kind of negative reaction, but Daryl is clear-eyed and smirking just a little, that empty kind of amusement that could be just on the surface, shielding the currents of all kinds of emotions, fear and anger to name a prominent few. Daryl shakes his head just faintly at Rick. "_You_ are fucken_ trashed_," he tells Rick, teases him, and it sinks in somewhat abruptly that _yeah_, he _is _trashed.

He's drunk and he just kissed Daryl, for no reason other than impulse.

He laughs his agreement, accepts the bottle of whatever from Daryl's reach, and takes another thick swig to numb his mouth of the memory. But alcohol was not bleach, no matter how many people claimed it was. He could not erase it completely. It wasn't detergent, either, no way to wash the taste away that would haunt him come morning, smoke in his mouth and knowing exactly why. Rick would find his lips stained with the knowledge of what it felt like to kiss another man, to kiss Daryl.

He thinks about it clearly when he's sober, during the mundane rip and pull of the weeds at the very edges of the vegetable garden. He wonders who that last person was - before himself, of course - that Daryl kissed.

He wonders if they liked it as much as Rick had, and something about that realization sinks into place where it hadn't before. He recalls the feeling of Daryl's mouth, pausing over the sensation and accidentally brings the gardening glove up to his face, tasting soil. He remembers where he is, who he is, and aggressively uproots a cauliflower seedling in unthinking error.

.:.

* * *

There's three of them in the car, but Glenn's asleep – _they think_ – in the back seat, and Rick's pretty damn certain Daryl will be too if he doesn't say anything.

"_Can I tell you something?"_

Daryl, who had been partly pillowing his head against the strap of the seatbelt, picks his head up and opens his eyes. He looks first to the rearview mirror, craning his neck when he couldn't see Glenn's reflection from that angle, blinking the tired slope from his eyes all the while.

Rick watches it all at the edge of his peripheral. _"I never liked squirrel meat."_

Daryl stares incredulously at him for a beat, like he couldn't believe Rick took him from the arms of sleep just to say that. _"Sorry I ain't been caterin' to yer needs, princess,"_ Daryl's roughened voice tells him.

Rick smiles at Daryl, seemingly oblivious to the hunter's irritation, and digs a hand into the pocket of his jacket, a crinkle of plastic that stirs the air. He thrusts his hand out toward Daryl, _"peppermint?"_ he asks, and in the centre of his palm a tiny sealed packet over a red and white swirled lolly rests.

Daryl stares at the peppermint in Rick's hand for a moment, and with a single laugh and quiet smile he takes it, rough fingers and ungentle touch somehow familiar of this man. He tears the plastic wrapper with his incisors, and Rick smirks when he hears the candy scrape over the back of his teeth.

"_Can I tell you somethin'?"_ Daryl asks, voice muffled around the peppermint in his mouth, _"I ain't never really liked it, neither."_

Glenn wakes a few minutes later, and whines about where his peppermint is until Rick carelessly tosses one over his shoulder at the young man, Daryl snickering when it unintentionally hits Glenn on the chin.

.:.

* * *

"-and should your fires have unearthed my desires, rather than burned the marrow from my bones, I'd have loved you sooner and with more soul. But it was in the shade of my womanly heart that my seedlings of doubt did grow. Though my affections did reach for your light, brittle ferns still unfurl in the damp and dark places so dear to me. Places your eyes told me you would burn away. My redwood heart said 'not today'..." Rick glanced up from watching his daughter suckling on her morning bottle, to the Greene sisters and Hershel sitting around the table dragged into the cell block. Beth glances self-consciously over at Rick with her teeth worrying her lip, then back down at her sister with the journal in her hands. "Sweetie, this is..."

"Beautiful," Hershel interrupts Maggie's hesitant silence, "you've got your mother's way with words, sweetheart."

Beth's mouth quirks to the side, picks at her fingernails, staring anxiously at her journal. "I don't usually like letting people read it, but..."

Maggie frowns at the girl, and her fingers seem to itch on the edge of the pages, like she wants to turn them and keep reading more, but she respects her sister's privacy and closes the hardcover notebook, hands it to Beth who snatches it like it's a lifeline. "What's it about?"

Beth's face transforms, from nervous to fake, all in a matter of seconds. Her eyes gleam unsure even when a smile presses against her lips, and she tucks the journal under a thin arm. "Unrequited love," she shrugs casually, and Rick can't help but think it's terribly artificial.

"Well," Maggie says, sounding reassured by Beth's uneasy smile, "keep writing, sis. And let me read more sometime, I'd really love to. I never knew you could write like that."

"What do you think, Rick?" Hershel asks, drawing Rick into the conversation he wasn't entirely sure he was a part of. Apparently he was.

Rick can only nod, because he doesn't know what else he could possibly say. Beth seemed almost disappointed by her family's reactions, like she was expecting something different, and Rick didn't want to drive that disappointment further. Judith started squirming in his arms, providing the distraction he needed to escape the room, leaving the bottle on the table beside Hershel and hushing his daughter who seemed to think that now was the perfect time to start a low whine, building up to a good cry.

Later that evening, when Rick's serving himself and Carl their dinner, he catches sight of Beth and Zach, and he sees that fake, discontented smile again when the boy leans in and kisses Beth's cheek. But despite her sugar-coated layer, she still seemed comfortable enough tucking herself under his arm, chattering away with him in response to whatever question he asked her. It's not his business, he decides.

He's preoccupied with problems of his own, after all.

Watching Daryl across the hall eating with Carol, Glenn, and Maggie, fingers in his food and lip glistening from where he'd licked over it, he knows he definitely has a problem all his own.

Some time after that drunken kiss, Rick decided he wanted another, tasting less of alcohol and more of something primal and perhaps a little desperate. He wanted to kiss Daryl again, a desire that had started so small yet so haunting, and no amount of chores could distract him from it. Not the gardening, or rearing the baby chickens and pigs, or the fence maintenance. In fact it was quite the opposite; his thoughts of Daryl were the distracting ones, and therein lies the problem.

"Hey, Rick!" Glenn calls for him, and Rick goes to the cluster of people he called his own, his family that was still so separate from the Woodbury folk and the strays they'd picked up over time The ones that respected him in ways the Woodbury folk never had reason to.

He goes to them, talks to them about some of the decisions made on the council, and listens to the small list of problems that had arisen in the months – a battery shortage being one.

When his eyes gravitated to Daryl's mouth as the man spoke, telling him they'll be living in the dark again if they don't find a solution soon, nobody noticed. Not even Daryl.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** Only three chapters in this side-project. I wanted to write something other than Sapien, and hallelujah, I actually finished it! Next chapter will be posted some time next week.

**Love, MK**


	2. Selene

**Hyperion**

_Part II_  
_Selene_

.:.

"_Okay, first drink you ever had,"_ Rick laughs, only half of a question. Daryl's boot scuffs when his step falters, and Rick hates the feeling he gets when the amusement that had been lighting up the hunter's eyes dimmers.

Just the two of them today. They were assessing a town close by, one centred around a grand total of three blocks either side of the main street, dominated by single-story brick veneer buildings with wide glass store-fronts. The town itself was barely a twenty minute drive from the prison. It was one of Woodbury's old hotspots, and they'd just now been informed on its location, so the likelihood of there being anything worth looting was low. When they first arrived, Daryl made a passing comment about how some of the stores were so old fashioned they reminded him of where he grew up - the barbers, with it's traditional red and white barbers pole, a line of antiques behind the glass, and the black and white checkered linoleum floors; the milk bar with its white-framed bay window, fabric awning torn and littered with dead leaves, and a cowbell that chimed when a breeze channeled through the broken panes of the front door; the tattoo parlor with its recessed entry, neon signs grey without power spelling 'tattoos' and 'piercings' in the window, stone struts lining the eave above hung with spiraling steel wind chimes that gave the illusion of movement.

There were walkers. There were always walkers. Must be something to be said about their survival conditioning that they were both unperturbed by the growling, shambling dead. It was easy to forget how well he and Daryl synchronised their movements, but whenever it did cross Rick's mind it amazed even him how intuitive they were, eluding the walkers that were of little threat and dispatching the ones that were too close for comfort. Sometimes they didn't even have to look at one another to know where they were being lead, clearing one another's path and checking around corners before letting each other pass.

The street was clear of danger for now, giving them the time to reminisce about growing up in their small towns; back when computers were still foreign hulking contraptions, and the term 'boys will be boys' implied trouble making via boredom rather than the justification of crime. Rick remembers spending afternoons down by the river fishing for eels and catfish with Shane and their friends, roller-skating through the town at night to give bored cops something to chase along the quiet streets, and playing softball with all the other kids – even the girls, who nobody gave crap for playing after the first time when one beat the shit out of the pitcher with the bat for mocking her swing.

As driven mad as he'd been growing up with what seemed so little to do, he once mourned that Carl would never experience the same things, the generation gap too wide. Now he just mourned Carl's lost childhood altogether.

Then they stumbled across a bar blackened by fire. The question seemed so harmless, too.

"_First drink didn't count,"_ Daryl mumbles. _"Had ta walk home from school every day, no matter what the fuck the weather was doin'. Real scorcher one afternoon, an' by the time I walked through the front door all I wanted was a damn water. Saw a glass on the counter, sculled half of it 'fore I realised it was moonshine. Spat most of it out but fuck, my head was spinnin' for hours."_

Daryl never said his age, so Rick assumed he was young when that happened. There was a conspicuously funny look on the man's face, though. While Rick figured he might've looked back and laughed if it'd happened to him instead, Daryl seemed bothered by it.

"_So when was your first real drink?"_ he asks instead, before realising he should probably have changed the subject.

"_You first,"_ Daryl grouses, then grab's Rick's sleeve, tugging him toward the scorched bar. _"Hold up, lets see if there's anything left."_

The whole place seemed structurally unsound, even if it was a brick building, but Rick brushes off the paranoia for the sake of keeping that look away from Daryl's face. He watches the hunter kick the last lingering shards of glass from the frame of the window, crystalline pebbles crackling under their boots. Opening the door wasn't an option, Rick realises, seeing the stack of tables and chairs pushed against it, barring it, even if they were barely charred skeletons of the furniture they used to be. The abstract barricade would probably crumble to charcoal if touched, but why risk it when you can do it Daryl's way?

After climbing in through the front window, Daryl strides straight over to the faintly singed bar like he owns the place. It appeared most of the fire damage was limited to the front of the establishment, though everything otherwise untouched still held a lingering layer of ash. Smoky glass bottles lining the back wall beyond the bar glistened like new when Daryl ran his thumb over them.

Rick watches the other man admire the selection, setting his own hands on the dusty bar, skin coming back grey.

"_Sixteen,"_ Rick says finally, Daryl glancing over at him at first like the sound of Rick's voice interrupted him somehow, _"Shane's parents went out of town for the weekend and he thought it'd be a good idea for us to crack into the liquor cabinet. Man, did he get a hiding for it when his Pa found out!"_

Daryl's back is turned to him at first, but after a few seconds he turns and rests his elbows on the bar top, folding his arms over it. The ash on the counter smears over the leather sleeves of his jacket like paint.

"_Thirteen,"_ Daryl says softly, but his eyes are hard, daring Rick to judge him. So Rick nods, doesn't say anything, and apparently that was the right reaction to have. _"Merle was home for a time so I was his responsibility, which was never a good thing. Our old man was AWOL, so he took me with 'im to this party, then left me with some of his friends."_

Rick's already cringing at the thought, trying to imagine what Daryl might've looked like at thirteen years old. A lanky boy with sandy hair, a smirk more than a smile, naïve eyes the colour of deep water_._ A child, just following his big brother, and whether it was because he had nowhere else to go or because he wanted Merle around, it was still so sad to know those naïve eyes wizened much too soon. Perhaps sooner than he thought.

When Daryl eventually keeps talking, taking up a bottle from below the bar in one hand and two shot glasses in the other, Rick knew he wasn't imagining the strained twine of his voice. Like he's never said it aloud before, but he wanted to.

"_They made a sport outta getting' me as shit-faced as possible 'fore my brother found out." _Daryl slams the shot glasses a little too hard on top of the bar. Sturdy and solid, the glass sang when knocked together without breaking, and soon after the bottle top comes off with a crackle, the sounds so familiar _en masse_ that their melody is almost nostalgic. _"'c__ourse Merle was too busy getting' his rocks off to notice until I'd already passed out, not 'til I woke up by pukin' all over the joint. 's all I really remember, throwin' up for nearly two days straight."_

Rick watches the burnished liquid spill over the side of one shot glass before Daryl moved to fill the next one, swirls of ash and dust speckling the small puddle left behind. The hunter's hardly paying attention to his own movements, acting on practiced ease rather than precision. He slides the first glass toward Rick, charcoal-stained fingers glistening dark when the alcohol touches his skin.

"_First real drink was a shot of good ol' fashioned whisky," _he says, though his voice is lacquered with sarcasm and without the honest kind of cheer he might've held had this been any other conversation. Rick feels like such an asshole, even if it wasn't though he knew any better,. He doesn't have the heart to refuse when Daryl holds out his own glass. Reluctantly, Rick clinks them together. _"Bottom's Up."_

It was the first time Rick realised that not every memory that was good for him was good for Daryl, too. A few weeks later, when the two of them are stuck in a farm house overnight and Rick starts talking about his nightmares because he could barely think about anything else, he realises they don't all have to be good things. You gotta take the good with the bad if you want to know someone, and Rick wants to know Daryl, whatever the man's willing to tell him.

.:.

* * *

Rick's been on his knees in the messy pumpkin patch all day. He really didn't need this.

His knees are stiff and creaky, his shirt is stuck to the small of his back, and his skin itches from the bristly hairs on the vine. It starts to rain, a light shower typical for this time of spring, and Rick stubbornly keeps trying to direct the tendrils of the eager pumpkin vine away from strangling the neighbouring cabbages plants. Carl ran off early, but Rick didn't really mind, not when he saw his son was jogging off to meet up with Patrick. The older boy was a good influence for Carl, even if it did end up doubling his workload in tending the crops.

Finally, when it's been raining long enough that Rick's skin starts to ice over and his hair is spiraled and dripping over his brow, he gives up.

What he didn't need was to find out that the battery shortage he'd been warned about last week was actually serious.

"We're down to the last triple-A," Carol says as she shuffles through the cardboard box in the storeroom where they kept the batteries, taking out a heavy cardboard packet and flipping it around to read the back, "and a bunch of Ds and Cs that we haven't got much use for anyway."

Rick groans, stepping out of the cramped storeroom and giving Carol enough room to stand up. "What happened?"

"I guess we weren't thinking about it," she says, placing the box back on the shelf. "With all the new arrivals, we never realised how fast we'd go through them. We've been focused on food and clothes and things to keep us busy, it just slipped our minds. It wont happen again."

"When's the next run?"

Carol, eyeing him standing there in his damp clothes with his dirty knees and muddy boots, shakes her head. "Tomorrow," she says, and then stares like she's expecting Rick to say something in response to that one word. When he doesn't, she turns back to stocked shelves in the storeroom, pulling one out that looked to have extra cooking utensils inside, staring at them in a way that seemed she wasn't really looking for anything in particular. "You should talk to Daryl about it," she says softly, then shoves that box back onto the shelf too, uninterested in its contents just as Rick thought.

_I just might._

.:.

* * *

It was another happenstance that stranded five of them overnight. Daryl offered to ride back ahead of them, but as it turned out the chances of that actually occurring was zero. Rick wouldn't allow it for one, and at some point in the discussion Daryl switched sides, abandoning his own corner and agreeing with Rick that it was the better choice not just for him but for them. When Michonne tried to pitch in her own two cents worth to back Daryl up - _"better if the others know we aren't all dead,"_ she argued – she wasn't expecting both Rick and Daryl point out that their collective safety was more important than a few frayed nerves back at the prison.

And that was the end of that.

With blood in the air and their abandoned vehicles a near ten minute's jog away, not to mention the sunset and the urgent attention needed for the injured man in their group, Rick had to wonder what Daryl was even thinking in the first place by suggesting he'd go back.

With them they had Tyreese, and a man named Jack they picked up right after the Woodbury people migrated to the prison. He was older than Rick, peppered with grey hair and a matching sporadic taste for recklessness that came from watching his family be torn to shreds. He confided in Rick that the one thing he'll never forget was his teenage daughter's guts slipping down to her feet when she broke free from the assault of walkers, making it all of five steps before her hands could no longer contain her innards.

Jack's bad luck followed him, and after falling prey to a crude trap his leg was now broken, bones snapping like the twigs that had collapsed underfoot before plummeting the man to the bottom of a five-foot ditch. Though the fall wasn't too far, the nature of it and the terrible landing had done fair damage to the man's leg, and it was just ironic that they were so soon able to find shelter in an abandoned, isolated house, the neighbouring residences far enough apart that you had to angle your head a certain way to even glimpse them through the thick trees. The thicker the trees, the fewer walkers, and thankfully they'd come into a rather dense area of woodland in their escape.

Rick's main concern wasn't even the walkers. Somebody had to have set that trap, so the likelihood of one of these houses tucked into small pockets of the woods not being quite so abandoned as they seemed was higher than Rick was comfortable with.

After tending to Jack's leg, which was accompanied with a lot of screaming around the grotty bandanna Daryl shoved between the man's teeth and a hopeless resignation when they realised they couldn't do anything, they secured the house with barricades and locked the rooms that were of no use to them. Michonne volunteered for watch, and the rest of them split up between the three bedrooms and the living room. Rick was perfectly fine with taking the couch, thinking Michonne would choose to wake him when she wanted to retire from watch.

He was wrong, because apparently Michonne wanted a bed rather than a couch, and she obviously had no qualms stealing Daryl's.

He wakes to the sounds of Daryl shuffling past, watches with tired eyes as the other man, oblivious to Rick so it seems, slides the stack of chairs from where they're posed up against the front door. It's new dawn, so the sight of a bit of colour in the sky when the entry door swings open isn't quite so jarring as the way Daryl's skin lights up pale electrum, the pre-sunrise glow reaching through the dense canopy. Daryl shudders, breath steaming in the air, and lingers in the doorway with caution before finally slipping out onto the veranda and closing the door behind him.

Rick doesn't even pretend his heart isn't pounding much too hard, uncomfortable with knowing Daryl is outside, neither in his line of sight nor in any manner of company. He thinks of the trap in the woods, of the walkers that sometimes lie so dormant you wouldn't know they were reanimated until they snatch your ankle, of that early morning light that'll do nothing to conceal Daryl from danger. He thinks about it until he starts to feel himself fade back toward sleep, eyes closed and mind travelling to a quiet place, until it occurs to him.

Daryl never came back inside.

Rick's on his feet, pulling his gun from beneath the couch cushion, and stalking toward the door before he even made the conscious decision to wake back up again.

The front door squeaks when he rips it open, and Daryl startles, a stem of ash slipping from the end of his cigarette and onto his lap when he jumps. He busies himself with brushing it off, Rick taking the opportunity of Daryl's distraction to quickly tuck his gun into the back of his jeans and feign calm.

It doesn't work, because barely two seconds after Daryl's giving him an up-and-down. _"Where's the fire?"_

"_Just...didn't know what you were doing out here, is all."_

Needlessly, Daryl gestures with his half-spent cigarette, the glow of the cherry eye-catching in the thin dawn light, like a molten firefly among silhouettes. Daryl takes another drag, the glow of the cigarette erupting as it scalds the paper, and wisps of grey trails out the man's nose when he inspects it between his fingers. When he does exhale, it's a blend of fog and smoke, and though Rick's never approved of smoking and it bothers him sometimes, he can't deny the appeal it held. It was quite normal for teenagers to do it while he was growing up, once a cheap habit to maintain, but one drag and he was ruined for ever putting his lungs through that kind of misery. It had been so sexualized, and watching the billow of smoke gently ribbon from Daryl's mouth he wasn't going to pretend he was ignorant as to why.

"_Y'know, I ain't never offered a smoke to nobody I didn't like."_

Rick thinks back to several instances where Daryl's offered his crinkled carton of cigarettes to somebody, the times the gesture was accepted fewer still. T-Dog, Glenn, Carol, Tyreese, and several people from Woodbury so far came to mind. There'd certainly been more.

Then he remembers how early on Daryl held out an unlit smoke toward him, two mornings after the farm and just hours after proclaiming himself the leader of the group without room for question. The others weren't weak, they were strong at the centre, but they were wrapped in a casing of delusion and he needed them to open their eyes. They weren't like him, they weren't like Daryl, not completely. They avoided his heavy stare and fell quiet around him, tears in some pairs of eyes and fear in their rigid bodies, like he would ever turn on them, and he'd been so angry at their fear despite understanding it. He was only trying to protect them.

He didn't sleep that night, though he doubted many of them did. Daryl was one of the few who had no problem shutting his eyes while somebody was on watch, and though it took almost an hour before the man actually fell asleep, but that he could close his eyes at all was a mystery to Rick even now. Daryl was not a man to trust easily, yet at the height of everyone's disappointment and fear of him, Daryl was able to relax. He still doesn't know what to make of it, but now he knew the answer to a different, subtler question. When he'd gone to relieve himself the next morning he came back to Daryl leaning against the crumbling masonry wall, preparing to light a smoke. Now he knows why Daryl held out the unlit cigarette when he hadn't much seemed like a man willing to share.

"_I didn't realise,"_ Rick says quietly, not sure if he was apologising, though he probably should.

That morning, he just looked at Daryl and walked past. Other things on his mind, a lack of sleep from the past two days plaguing him, he ignored what he thought was just a mindless gesture and kept walking. To his credit, Daryl didn't seem bothered one way or another.

"_Don't matter,"_ Daryl tells him, about to bring the cigarette back to his lips. The hunter pauses, and with a small tilt of amusement in the corner of his mouth he holds it out toward the other man, just in reach in case Rick actually decided to take it.

Rick laughs, misted breath dispersing as he waves his hand 'no thanks'. _"So does this mean you like me?"_

Daryl's smiling even as he shrugs._ "Yer alright,"_ he replies mildly, moves to the chipped white banister of the veranda and sets his elbows on it, watching over his shoulder as Rick comes to join him. The light's a little clearer now, shining like silver in the iris of Daryl's eyes when he glances at the quiet woods around them, cancer stick dwindling between his lips. There's a citrine tinge to the east; a cloudless day was certainly something to be thankful for. The air smells damp from morning dew, the aroma of cigarette smoke faint and familiar above that, such a peaceful hour.

"_You're alright, too."_

Daryl stops gazing around the treeline, looking at Rick at first with an expression he couldn't read. Always so hard to read. His eyes squint, like he was trying to examine Rick as well, struggling just as much in turn. He sucks the cigarette once more, then bashes it roughly on the banister by his arm and flicks it into the damp front garden cluttered with bark and leaf litter and wood chips, fallen branches and dead plants left unattended.

"_You don't make a habit of suckin' up to people."_

"_I ain't,"_ Rick presses softly, leaning in to catch Daryl's diverting line of sight, _"I mean it."_

Daryl snickers. _"What, that I'm 'alright'?"_

Rick ignores the fact he's being teased, suddenly pressed for Daryl to know he's genuine. _"That I like you."_

Daryl shifts a little uncomfortably at Rick's proximity when he meets the eyes seeking his own, but he's amused regardless, even when he takes a step further along the banister to regain some personal space. His eyes flicker to the front window overlooking the living room, masked by translucent white curtains embroidered with flowers and ivy, and Rick wonders if somebody's behind them. _"Best watch yerself. People might start talkin'."_

"_You wanna keep it a secret then?"_ Rick asks, biting his cheek. _"You ashamed of me, is that it?"_

Daryl lifts his brow at Rick like he's stupid, but Rick only smiles. A prolonged moment of staring passes, and it's strangely neither awkward nor intense, just looking at one another in the waking yawn of sunrise. Rick breaks it first, giving in to instinct to glance around the woods again in a constant search for danger.

He says _"you're a good man, Daryl,"_ into the foggy morning chill, doesn't look at the bristling hunter beside him to see what kind of disbelief may be clouding his bright eyes, doesn't finish with _'one of the best' _like he wanted to. He follows Daryl back inside minutes later, goes to find something for them to eat while Daryl collapses onto the couch where Rick had slept, and they don't talk about it again.

.:.

* * *

"I knew about Shane n' Lori," Daryl tells him, says it like it's been bothering him for a long time.

Rick's voice is flat when he says "everybody knew about them."

"I knew first," Daryl responds, and Rick can't help but turn to look at the man in this ugly artificial light, watches the hunter's eyes close as he tips his head back against the wall of Rick's cell. They're sitting on the ground, some time well into the night, with only a large torch by their feet lighting up Rick's cell. It's an awful faux moon, and it casts unattractive shadows on both their faces, under-lighting the lines of weariness and age embossed into their skin.

Daryl was going on a run tomorrow, and it was a long one. He might be gone for days. He told Rick this with eyes begging for his unheard plea not to go ignored. He wanted Rick to volunteer and follow him out the gates, but he would never say it aloud because he knew now. He understood why Rick couldn't leave the prison, not with his gun holstered at his hip, not with his son watching from the field.

It wasn't his choice.

It still surprised him when Daryl came to him and sat down beside Rick on the floor, even though Rick was only sitting down against the wall because he'd just been struggling with his boots. He only barely managed to get them off before Daryl came in, torch in hand, an insinuating comment about the sounds Rick had been making sliding off his tongue with ease.

Life was so routine for them that they began confessing things the moment they were alone with one another.

"I saw 'em, out in the woods, first week Merle 'n I found the group. I knew she wasn't his wife, an' the kid wasn't his, but it weren't none of my business."

"You saw them together...as in..."

Daryl opens his eyes a sliver, turns his head against the wall and nods, lips tight and tone careful. "Yeah, _as in._"

Rick thought that was all, but it wasn't.

"I never would'a told you, neither."

Rick keeps watching, reads the shadows that Daryl's usually bright eyes had become. "You're telling me _now._"

"You already know," Daryl shrugs, picking at a loose thread on the sleeve of his cotton jacket. "An' if they kept it up after you found 'em, I still wouldn't a' said a thing."

Even the betrayal that sent a volt through his entire body didn't excuse the words that came out of his mouth. "I nearly shot you back in Atlanta."

When Daryl's eyes close and his chin lowers to his chest, Rick recalls how identical that look was to that first time he held a gun to the man's head. This time there wasn't the squint of fighting back tears and humiliation, but that hopelessness was there, and it was just...

"I was thinking of Carl, and Lori. The moment I saw Merle was gone, I saw you take aim and I thought 'if I don't find his brother, he's going to wait. He'll wait until we get back, and he'll kill my family. He'll kill me'. I watched you lower your crossbow and for a moment I was going to pull the trigger anyway."

"I'd be lyin' if I said the idea never crossed my mind," Daryl admits quietly, and Rick realises he doesn't get to feel strange about Daryl considering killing him, not when he'd just admitted to doing the same.

"Even when we were tracking Sophia in the woods, I kept thinking you might've just been leading me away to finish me off. I couldn't see any tracks, I didn't know what you were reading. I just thought, either you really were lookin' for that little girl, or you were lookin' for a shot, or that you were gonna let that walker get to me."

Daryl smiles weakly. "But you never did pull that trigger."

"Thank God for that."

Rick feels a bit of relief for when Daryl looks over at him, something like shock in his eyes, something that fades when he can no longer maintain the contact. "My mom, she wasn't always an alcoholic. She never broke open the bottle 'til my old man broke her arm in two places."

Rick wouldn't be honest if he said he wasn't waiting for Daryl to start talking about his father. It didn't mean he was prepared for the churning feeling low in his gut, the sickness he felt that sometimes made his head spin and his skin prickle like he was covered in baby spiders. It was the sickness he felt when he got called in on a domestic, or tried to take a statement from a victim of abuse; the ones he couldn't help without their permission, and the ones he never saved.

Daryl picks at the loose thread again, unwinding some of the stitching on the hem of his sleeve cuff. He hears the words in his head, explained to him at his obligatory therapy session after one of the ones he couldn't save, a woman whose neighbours called in about the noise she was making in the garage, destroying everything her husband owned, before overdosing minutes too soon to be revived. _Common symptoms in victims of abuse include a destructive nature, where they may take things apart or break them without any intention to repair the damage, as minimal or extensive as it may be._ Daryl suddenly rips the thread, snapping it, then starts picking at another.

"My dad was kinda rough. Two boys, guess he figured he never needed to be any other way. But I was six when he first hit 'er. Somebody who had no business stickin' their nose into it told him she'd been sleepin' around. He started beatin' on 'er for anything he could make some excuse for." Rolling his shoulders, like they were stiff from a night's unrest, he mutters, " must've got a taste for it."

_That's why he wouldn't have told me. _

"I'm sorry."

_Sorry for everything._

"Shit happens," Daryl mumbles.

The silver fractals on the ceiling flicker, the iris of light fading slowly, so slowly. Still strung up with too much tension, they both merely watched, Rick in baited breath as the patterns reflected about the room disappeared right before his eyes, Daryl fixated on the torch itself by their feet. The red glow of the plastic was dulled, dimming with each passing second, but when Daryl's boot kicked it none too gently, it flickered in pained protest then died.

The silence is heavy between them until, quieter than Rick expected, Daryl comments, "them rechargeable are such shit."

Rick is suddenly much too aware of how close they are, pressed side-to-side like that night on watch. The side where they're touching is warm, but at the unwarranted memory of their stupid drunken kiss and knowing that Daryl's lips are in reach, the rest of his body begins to heat up to match. Daryl's farthest hand, large and too strong for its own good, reaches around the hunter's body and slaps Rick on the chest. The touch echoes through the deep well of his torso.

"Want me to see if I can't find summore?" Daryl asks, even as he's already diverting his weight to his hand and pushing up from the floor, and though Rick can't see him he just knows where to reach, because by chance Daryl's face is too close and Rick can only think one thing. He really wants another damn kiss.

Daryl is hovering just above the ground, weight on his heels and one hand, when Rick traps him with a grip at the back of his head. Their lips graze, Rick lingering back for a moment long enough for Daryl to pull away, but he does neither that nor lean in to meet Rick's mouth evenly. Still, when Rick kisses him, he responds just faintly.

Rick doesn't prolong it, but he moves back with trembling ribs and a dry mouth, hoping Daryl will forgive him if he's crossed a line.

"…and you ain't even drunk."

_Why do I have to be drunk if I want to do that?_

Apparently there's a reason. He can feel Daryl deliberate unseeing stare on his face, one that stayed on him as Daryl slowly so slowly lowers himself back down. Recklessly he decides it's an invitation, because now the torch is forgotten and so was their conversation. Rick's blood isn't burning but his lips _are. _Maybe Daryl's will soothe them. He's willing to give it a shot. Eager, really.

He has to lean over to find Daryl's mouth with his own again, almost misses in the blinding dark, but it's deliberate and bold, and maybe Daryl shouldn't have sat back down. Maybe he should've gone off on a wild goose chase after batteries Rick already knew he wouldn't find, and maybe Rick should've let him. But he prefers kissing in the dark like he's putting his lips to a firework, he'd rather to that even for a second than to be alone with the stale memories of what they'd shared aloud tonight.

Daryl is frozen against him for a second, then wraps his fingers in Rick's collar, neither pulling nor pushing. Rick puts just enough space between them to feel the words as clearly as he hears them. "The hell you playin' at."

Rick figures kissing him again is easier than answering the question, so he brings their mouths together, so softly as though Daryl's lips were razors. He gasps when those razor lips return pressure, and what might've been just a casual response becomes so much more when he feels the other man's tongue linger. It's hesitant at first, but Rick welcomes Daryl to deepen it, and deepen it he does. They skip the awkward fumbles of a first kiss completely, slip into a routine that seemed impossible even with that drunken mishap in the guard tower. Rick finds he's kissing Daryl like he hasn't kissed in years, wet hungry passion, a full-bodied enthusiasm that puts him on his knees over Daryl's lap.

Daryl might've been going along with it, but his hands directing Rick closer said more than words could in this moment. One of Daryl's hands disappears from his back to his cheek, and it's with a thumb tracing over Rick's beard that Daryl finally breaks the kiss.

"No."

Rick's throat is full of cobwebs, and he would've already moved away if he wasn't still reeling from the outright shock._ No?_

"No, this ain't...this is a problem."

"This ain't a problem," Rick whispers, but the sound of his voice turns Daryl rigid beneath him, the thumb that stroked over his beard clamping down hard against his jaw.

"Rick," he breathes, and Rick knows he didn't imagine the way the hand still against the small of his back tested its grip. "Rick, what're you doin'."

_I'm trying to kiss you._

"Don't think," he says, works his nails gently over Daryl's scalp, feels the crescents of nails dig into his back in reflex. He removes the hand from his jaw, lets Daryl put it wherever he wants, surprised and pleased that the hunter chose to rest it on his thigh. "Forget it's me for a second."

"I can't."

_Something else, _Rick's mind screams at him, _think of something else._

"You ever think about it?" He runs his fingers through the hair at the back of Daryl's head, pulls him away from the wall, leans close enough that their breath ghosts one another's face. He feels the heat of Daryl's skin, the flush that's worked over his body, and hopes it's arousal and not embarrassment. "That night on watch?"

"You were drunk."

"I remember. Don't you think about it?"

"Do you?"

It was quite an obvious answer, seeing as he was now straddling Daryl on the floor of his cell. "All the time," he says, and feels the shiver that crosses Daryl's skin.

He doesn't get an answer beyond the mouth that crashes against his own, the fist in his hair, and the vice grip on the back of his thigh that pulls him closer. He didn't really need one; he was just curious.

They don't even leave the floor of his cell.

He gets dirt on the palms of his hands when Daryl tactically moves him onto his back, feels it sticking to his cheek when he turns his face against the cold concrete, never thinks to pillow his head on something when harried hands make short work of one another's jeans. Ice leeches through his clothes into his skin, and it's release just for Daryl's warm palms to skim up his sides beneath his shirt, it's comforting when his searing hot mouth decorates his stomach.

There's discomfort in every movement but he barely even notices, because if he had he'd have dragged Daryl up onto the bed. The room that had seemed so large and hollow around them barely even existed at all. All he wanted to think about was Daryl's rough fingers around him, and in turn the feel of Daryl's answering arousal in the palm of his hand, both so strange and both so welcome.

"Fucken' _hell, Rick_," Daryl groans when Rick's fingers became experimental and teased the head of his leaking cock, hand still obscured and restricted by denim, a touch for sensation's sake rather than rushed and desperate release. It's the only thing he says.

.:.

* * *

"_You good?"_ Daryl asks, and Rick just about jumps out of his skin. He's standing in front of their future vegetable garden, the one he and Carl had been digging yesterday, laughing with Hershel and Beth. Rick's cold actually, with his shirt too thin and the sleeves too short. Daryl was obviously the smarter one between them, wearing about three layers from what Rick could see at first glance, poncho over two shirts at least.

"_It's cold,"_ he says, mind apparently as numb as his fingers.

A half-smile crosses Daryl's lips. It's early morning, and not many people were awake, but Daryl was always fast to rise, at least as long as Rick knew him, and providing alcohol hadn't been involved in the twenty-four hours prior.

But seeing the man here makes him wonder if perhaps he doesn't look a little crazy standing out in the middle of the field staring at nothing, so he starts walking back toward the prison and Daryl falls in step with him, not saying another word about it.

No, Daryl had something else to say. _"Got another run today at noon. Sasha wants to check out some houses they saw when they were on the run, so I said we'd check it out. Might be a walker problem, so-"_

"_I'm not going."_

Daryl stops mid-step._ "What?"_

"_I'm not going, Daryl."_

Rick finds he's holding his breath when he turns around, finding Daryl's eyes already by his hip, where his gun was permanently plastered to his side. Until yesterday. His hand strays to the naked feeling around his hips, where the weight of the gun had been such a comfort to him before now, and finally, finally Daryl looks up.

"_You ain't goin'."_

"_Not anymore."_

Rick meets Daryl's blank stare as long as he can, waiting for Daryl to say something in response, to ask questions or protest, but he gets nothing. Finally Rick can't stand the look the hunter's giving him anymore, the blank stare that dimmed his whole face, and he excuses himself to leave with a faint nod that goes unacknowledged.

He doesn't look back. Not that day.

.:.

* * *

Daryl was gone for three days. With nobody else he trusted to do it, Rick went outside the fence to check the snares, his gun reluctantly accepted from Carol's insistent hands. "I know you're trying to set an example," she tells him when she wraps his fingers around the gun belt, her eyes bright with knowledge just the same as Daryl's, like she was speaking from a personal place, "but what kind of example will you be setting by not defending yourself when it's necessary?"

Some of the snares had been successful, but the walkers had gotten every one. Empty handed and disappointed that he lacked a distraction from his thoughts of Daryl, he went back to the prison, half in hopes that the run had returned, half in hopes it hadn't.

He's let in through the gates by his smiling son, face alight with progress, and Rick feels bad for just a moment that he didn't get them any food. The feeling's erased by his son beaming at him, "Michonne's back, and Daryl."

Nobody even mentions the snares to Rick when he finds them in cell block C, standing around with smiles on their faces as they're handing out things requested, showing off their large haul that the very sight of made Rick's insides clench. Three days agonizing over Daryl's cold indifference before driving the leading car out the front gate, but still Rick wasn't entirely sure it was worth it.

He doesn't see Daryl at first, not until Carl calls his name and the man stands with a backpack in his hands, zipping it up even as he's turning to greet the energetic teenager.

Daryl locks eyes with Rick instead, and relief collapses down on him like a landslide. But there's something else, too, something that makes Rick's palms sweat. It makes his knees weak, his skin too small, his mouth too dry. It makes him turn around and leave the cellblock before anyone gets the chance to really notice he's left, and it makes him keep walking.

He's been using a candle the last few days, and it was out of habit that he lit it again tonight, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his hands over his eyes anyway, trying to evade looking at the floor where he and Daryl-

"You avoidin' me now?" Daryl asks, standing in the opening of Rick's cell. Strangely enough, Rick had heard him coming, but by choice he ignored it. He parts his fingers first, sees Daryl looking at the ground by his feet, and is surprised by the pleasant longing he felt at the sight, knowing he wasn't the only one who couldn't escape the memory they made together.

The candle on the basin flickers precariously when Daryl draws the curtain behind him.

"You weren't at dinner," Daryl points out, folding his arms.

Rick shrugs. _No point in lying,_ he decides. "I_ was _avoiding you."

"What's that about?" Daryl asks, but before Rick could say 'you know what', the hunter tips his head toward Rick, eyes on the man's hips, where his gun belt is still fastened.

Cautiously, Rick slides his hand over the gun, feebly blocking it from Daryl's view. "Snares."

"Alone?"

"Mm."

Daryl's mouth thins, and Rick waits, stirred every second Daryl continues to stare at the backs of his knuckles guarding his gun. "You ever comin' back out?"

"I told you once, no more."

"You ain't facin' it at all, you know that," Daryl tells him, a little darkly if Rick is willing to take notice. "This world, the way it is now? You can't just shut the gates on it."

"That's not what I'm doing."

"Yeah, you think so? No. No, you're afraid."

"And you're not?" Rick demands. "You are so afraid of facing your old life that you threw yourself into this one without hesitation, because it's everything you know. It's dark and it's ugly and it's violent, and you don't have to think about anything but surviving. It's easier for you to be alive now than it was before. You're scared of being alone like you always were, so you push it as far away as you can but it's always there and you're always bringing it up because you haven't dealt with it yet."

Daryl's eyes are sparking, combustion blue and furious, the look of a man who knows his own faults all too well but loathes to hear them from another. Rick figures people have been pointing out Daryl's flaws his whole life, and a second after he considers it Rick felt lower than dirt to be grouped with all those people. Everyone who had already disappointed Daryl in his life, and Rick was edging up to be one of them.

Before he forms the idea to make amends, Daryl narrows his eyes at Rick in a look that wasn't quite a glare. "We're the worst kinds of people for this." Rick realises Daryl's not talking about the apocalypse when the hunter, with one last gleaming flash of siren eyes, ducks his head and extinguishes the lone candle grieving wax over the basin, submerging them in darkness and the scent of candle smoke.

He hears Daryl grab the frame of the bunk above before he even realises how close the other man is.

"Ain't neither of us gonna deal with_ this_ 'til we have to."

Daryl's mouth tastes of peppermint, not alcohol or nicotine, and Rick's all too happy to chase it with his tongue, even when both of them are a bare ravel of tired limbs and sweat, when sleep is drawing them under and Daryl's damp hair is cooling between his carding fingers. He kisses Daryl until the hunter shoves him away and forces Rick to lay down against him, chin to shoulder, soothing fingers circling his scar and following the curve of his spine, reading the notches between like the age rings of a tree.

_Places your eyes told me you would burn away. My redwood heart said 'not today',_ Rick thinks incredulously, echoes of peppermint painting his lips. Passion is wildfire, a storm struck by lightning that turns you incandescent for one terrifying moment, a clarity that comes before all that you have is utterly destroyed and reborn again, and Rick was ready to lay down arms and let it take him.

He doesn't know where it came from or why, because there's no exact science to explain things like this, but that was alright with him.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** One more chapter to go, up some time next week.


	3. Eos

**Hyperion**

_Part III_  
_Eos_

.:.

"_Lori was good at making friends,"_ Rick says, kicking at a rock on the dirt track, seeing it escape into a determined plot of dry grass sprouting in the middle of the trail. Daryl is walking at his side, with a string of rabbits over one shoulder and crossbow over the other, looking truly unaffected by the excess weight, the only evidence he was feeling the load at all being the flex of his arms and the hand that kept adjusting its grip on the rope. Rick would've offered to help, but Daryl would've declined, probably even taken Rick's pack just to be spiteful - when he started having these types of conversations in his head, it intrigued him how accurate they were, but that was long ago.

Daryl glances at him and the forlorn look he gives the rock now unintentionally camouflaged in the grass. _He's always listening,_ Rick muses, _no matter what I say or_ when.

_"Every friend I made came and went, 'cept for Shane. Well..no, actually...even him."_

It's an uncommonly warm day for Winter. 'Animal' as a collective whole was hard to find this time of year. but by a stroke of luck they'd came across a bunch of rabbits feeding on fresh grass. There was still a bit of snow on the ground where they were eating, but most of it had melted away. Their ears flicked up for the sounds of danger every so often, but as evolution would have it Daryl had the stealth and speed of a true predator, and with arrows skewered through their chests they were now tonight's meal.

It was a quiet trip, the two of them out on a hunt, the same way as it'd been a year before when Daryl first started dragging him along. Trust and loyalty didn't make a friendship, and while merely months before Daryl was still just his ally something had changed.

Somewhere in Rick's sideways admission of Daryl being included in their family, and Daryl's more direct comment on the matter as he unceremoniously excused himself before Rick could come up with an adequate response, it became clear. They were like brothers in many a sense, but brothers were not always friends. Brothers did not always love each other. _Abel and Cain._

There was friendship between them, sprouting from the rich soil of their alliance, nurtured by the warmth the sun of their family shone down on them. He never really knew all that much about Daryl before, never truly cared to learn. He built his own story for the man – _bad childhood, and an adulthood that probably wasn't much better_ – but that wasn't to say he knew the man. Not the way he knows him now.

He's trailed off for probably a few minutes of quietly lugging along the trail, and Daryl draws him back from the cocoon of his mind. _"Yeah, never really had much luck with people, neither."_

"_No wonder we're friends, then." _Daryl stopped dead in the middle of the track, an unfamiliar frown that looked suspiciously bereft. His knuckles were bleaching from his grip on the rope tying the rabbits together, and seeing it Rick scrambles to correct himself. _"I mean, similar people, y'know?" _Daryl snorts, and Rick gets this feeling crawling down the back of his neck, wondering if maybe he should stop comparing them in likeness. He really doesn't mean to keep sticking his foot in his mouth.

"_Every man who called himself my friend, he wasn't,"_ is Daryl's placid response.

"_I ain't like that."_

"_I know,"_ Daryl says, and there's that uncomfortable shyness in his faint smile, that sincere look that makes Rick's brain twist in knots trying to explain why nobody ever gave Daryl what he deserved. _"You actually like me, r'member?"_

"_Well I actually know you."_

"_No,"_ Daryl murmurs below his breath, but that softness never left his eyes, comfortable in their solitary out here in the middle of the woods, on a dirt trail nobody walked anymore but them.

"_But I'm getting there,"_ Rick argues, tells rather than asks. He notes that Daryl neither agrees nor disputes the fact, but as complex a man as Daryl would surely know best just how close Rick was getting. He gestures with his head to keep walking, and Daryl does look up the length of the path ahead of them, but neither of them makes the first step.

"_Nobody's ever stuck around that long,"_ Daryl remarks. _"They usually tuck tail an' run when they realise how fucked up I am."_

"_You're not-"_ Rick starts, compulsively trying to correct the other man's self-worth, but he forces himself to choke it down. He remembers the story about Daryl's first drink, a thirteen year old boy who became little more than a party game when he was supposed to be on his brother's watch. He remembers the snippets he'd picked up so far, about Merle being in and out of Juvy, about his mother's tragic death and his father's neglect, being lost in the woods and yet nobody even noticed he was gone, the scars that lashed over his back-

He wonders at the kinds of things that may have crossed the man's mind growing up. He wonders what crosses his mind even now.

He starts again, carefully this time, aware that Daryl was watching his every damn movement and tracking everything he speaks like they were illustrations of thought rather than poor examples of it.

"_...you're not your experiences. You never were."_

"_You sure about that?"_ Daryl asks. His harsh grip is gone, flexing his fingers around the thin rope, the red imprints of the braid against his exhausted skin angry red. _"I ain't my old man, but he still made me. The crap people go through makes them. __You don't grow a backbone without bein' spineless first. __Just look at Carol; she ain't never gon' let no man do what her what that deadbeat did ever again."_

Rick doesn't want to talk about Carol. He wants to talk about Daryl.

"_That doesn't mean that what you went through makes you less than other people."_

"_Nobody's got time to deal with other people's problems," _Daryl shrugs, blinking against the hair that blows into his eyes. "_World o' damn opportunists. Liars an' cowards my whole life. Don't bother me none."_

It didn't matter what Daryl told him, or how resigned he sounded when he said it, because Rick couldn't believe that. He couldn't believe that being cast out his whole life didn't bother the man, because he knew for a fact it did. How could it not?

"_I'm neither,"_ Rick insists, taking a step closer. It doesn't escape him that Daryl doesn't step back. _"I ain't a liar, and I ain't a coward. I meant it when I said you're a good man,"_ and for the first time in weeks, he's glad he never finished with what he'd meant to say, because now was the right time to say it. Now, when he has Daryl's full attention, and that faint smile – _self-depreciating as it is_ – is fading from his lips. _"You're one of the best men I've ever met, I don't care what you or anybody else thinks of that. You're family to me now. I'd trust you with my life, and the lives of my children."_

"_,,,'s an awful lot'a trust."_

"_Exactly."_

Rick isn't sure he can completely explain the solemn look Daryl gives him. In fact, the longer he looks at it, the less sense it makes. _"Give it time,"_ the hunter says, _"you'll realise, same as everybody else."_

Daryl makes the first step, then several more before Rick starts to follow.

"_You're the one who'll realise."_

Daryl doesn't look at him, and they make it back to the prison without mentioning it again, though it burned the back of Rick's mind the very thought of what he should've said or done differently, anything to end that conversation on a lighter note. Preferably one where Daryl didn't walk away from it with that downtrodden expression of a man with too many hopes but none realised.

He wishes that wasn't who Daryl was, not by fault of the man himself but of all the people in his life before Rick.

.:.

* * *

Creatures of habit, Rick thinks when yet again he finds himself laying down the shovel come noon, wiping his brow free of sweat as he heads toward the fence crew. Daryl hears him coming, hears Karen and Carol greeting him, but spears one last walker through the torn nasal cavity before acknowledging him. He's panting, dreary-eyed in the way he always seemed to be when he killed too many in one day, and Rick scoops up one of the water bottles laying in the shade of the crates by the fence, bringing it with him the last few steps to meet the other man. Daryl's fingers leave red and brown smears on the plastic when he takes it. He's certain it was no mirage the way Daryl's hand shook when he reached for the water bottle, but restrains himself from touching the other man with the urge to comfort.

"You done for the day?" Daryl asks, same as he's done every day this past week since Rick had been taking a break to come find him.

This time, Rick gives a pale smile. "Maybe," he shrugs, watching the hunter raise the bottle to his lips.

"Why, what else's gotta be done?"

"Nothin'," he shrugs, honest, "just don't have anything better to be doing right now."

Daryl holds out the bottle toward him, the blood and dirt streaked on the plastic daunting despite knowing for himself that the water was clean. "We could always trade places. You can do the dirty work 'round here."

Rick thinks Daryl sounds just the wrong side of serious, and his voice wavers just a little when he tries to brush it off, "you wanna hunt for snails and pull weeds instead?"

"Fuck no," Daryl scoffs, rubbing his now freed hands over the front of his jeans and staining them too. "But give me a shovel and I'll figure out tha rest."

"You don't have to do it, you know," Rick says. His mouth is parched and he's feeling a bit lightheaded and heavy-footed, but he's yet to take a mouthful of water, playing with a fold in the corner of the label instead.

Daryl frowns, taking the bottle from him. Rick thinks back to the watch tower when he'd done the same with the alcohol, impatient at Rick's delay. He's lifting it to his lips when he asks, "what, pick up a shovel?". Rick shakes his head, then glances toward the pile of deader-than-dead walker bodies that splayed outward from the tilting fence. Daryl glances over, and the strange blend of stoicism and mild irritation falters from his voice. "No one else's gonna do it. You ain't."

"You know why I can't."

"Carl ain't a child-"

"-he's_ my _child," Rick says softly, knowing that others were too close and trying to divert what could possibly end up being an argument, which was something he really didn't need to deal with, ever. "And I have to protect my child. You yourself said it starts small in kids, and I'm not letting myself be blinded no more. My son's alive and he's healthy, and no matter what I ain't lettin' him turn out like..."

Daryl doesn't speak. His eyes are fixated on Rick's face like there was a novel written into his skin.

Rick thinks there just might be when he finishes in a whisper, "...like _me,_" passing through his lips unbidden and foul, yet Daryl's open expression is cemented there, and the only reaction he gets for those words is a smile_._ A fucking _smile._

"How's it feel?"

"How's what feel," he grumbles, still perturbed by Daryl's odd reaction to what sounded like the hem of a heated disagreement.

"Sayin' it aloud."

"You son of a bitch." It was a breath of a statement, blown away by the spring breeze, and Daryl's smile twitches, more or less Rick can't tell but there was a shift there that he didn't understand. "I told you I ain't hiding from it."

"That why you waited months to let me piece it together what the hell you were doin'?"

"I..."

Daryl scoffs, and Rick wouldn't be mistaken in thinking there was the pick of a sneer in the man's upper lip. "You should'a jus' told me, Rick." He barely moves his hands in time to catch the weight of the waterbottle against his chest, Daryl tossing back to him. He's glad the others had all wandered off by now, at least he thinks they have, because Daryl's voice was low but still lethal in how it injected into Rick's bloodstream. Daryl's shaking his head, but beneath that anger is a crack, a sliver of something else that Rick felt coil cold and remorseful. "The shit I trusted you with, hell the shit I still fucken trust you with, an' you can't even take a minute to tell me you were tryin'a fix yer boy 'cause you were scared he'd turn out like you? Like I, of all people, wouldn't understand?"

Rick just has to say "Why does it even matter?"

He doesn't mean it the way it sounds, but Daryl doesn't care for good intentions.

"Guess it fucken don't," Daryl mutters, taking his knife back out of its sheath. The plastic bottle crinkles in Rick's fingers when he squeezes it, Daryl turning his back on him the clear end of a conversation that couldn't afford to be left where it was.

He tries, just once. "Daryl, hey-"

"Got work to do," the hunter tells him, flat-toned and with the kind of restraint that Rick might've admired had the anger been directed at anybody but himself. Daryl dismisses him and whatever he was about to say with the wet slice of a knife between the bridge of two rotted eyes, the heavy crumple of a walker's now inanimate body the loudest punctuation to that one unspoken word.

_Leave._

His insides are still playing an unsure game of mix and match when he finds himself back in the garden. He spends a half hour just staring at the seedlings, sitting in the long grass and ripping up the dry blades with his hands, until Carl comes barreling down to him with an eager smile and starts putting on his gloves.

.:.

* * *

"_I don't regret it,"_ Rick says while he and Daryl are lingering by a row of broken cash registers, anxious to get out of this graveyard of a supermarket but still in wait of Michonne and Tyreese to catch up to them. Michonne had an epiphany, remembering something said to her by one of the Woodbury women as they were leaving, and had excused herself to go back. Tyreese, similar case, explained his sister Sasha had asked something quite the same of him.

Alone, words just fell out of his mouth.

"_Those men in the bar, the prisoners, and the Governor's men...I don't regret killing them. I never felt guilty for that."_

"_Weren't exactly the kinds of people you could feel sorry for,"_ Daryl quietly replies, _"if there's one thing you would never forgive, it's people threatenin' you an' yours."_

Rick wipes at the dead blood on the back of his dominant hand, only just now spotting it. _"Yeah,"_ he agrees, not looking away from the dark smear on his skin, _"but what if I should've felt something? We don't kill the living, remember? Maybe if I reacted differently, Carl..."_

Daryl's expressionless mask slips, a flash of the sympathy beneath. _"What did you expect?"_ Daryl asks him, _"shit happens, and it changes you, man."_

"_But Carl..."_ Rick trails off, sighing into the heel of his hand. Daryl watches it all, the exhaustion taking root. _"He's too young."_

"_Yeah,"_ Daryl shrugs, _"he is. An' Li'l Asskicker's even younger. You're fighting an uphill battle, man, tryin'a find that balance between keepin' yer kids young an' keepin' 'em alive."_

"_What am I fighting against,"_ he says, not intentionally.

Daryl swallows. _"Whatever wants to kill you,"_ he says, grim, _"same as it's always been."_

Their enemies were the cancers, the plagues that followed them in and just kept spreading no matter how they fought back. How many more 'Governor's were out there, waiting for the opportunity to overthrow them and take their home? How many 'Shane's were hiding in the skins of his people, like wolves in a flock of sheep?

They will never stop fighting for their own survival. _But still..._

"_Could it be my fault?"_

"_Look, way I see it? It's always been kill or be killed. Ain't no shame or blame in doin' what you gotta do,"_ Daryl tells him, setting a hand on the round of Rick's shoulder, nicked knuckles and chewed fingernails and tough skin. _"You wouldn't even kill a kid you knew could be a threat."_

"_You sound so sure."_

"_I was in that barn with you. I saw yer face when yer son told you ta pull the trigger. That look was already there before Carl opened his mouth."_

"_I don't know what happened with him."_

"_You got a strong kid."_ Daryl drops the hand from Rick's shoulder. _"He's a little lost, is all. Been there before as well, an' I still regret every life we lose." _Rick had a hard time believing it's simple as Daryl made it sound. Then Daryl gives him this soft borderline-smile, and Rick wonders.

Five days later he tells Carl to look at him, shivers at the cold way his son grants the request, tells the young teenager he's needed for something, and finally tells him to leave his gun where it is. It'll only get in the way.

.:.

* * *

"Hey. Rick."

_If I ignore it, maybe they'll go away._

The voice was quieter this time, but closer. "_Rick,_" he says, and a hand settles on the back of his shoulder, squeezing.

_He's not leaving,_ is Rick's first irritated thought in response, followed belatedly by the intruder's name. _Daryl._

He knows that voice, he knows that hand, hell he even knows that scent. It's for this reason and no other - b_ecause if it were important they wouldn't bother being nice about it_ - that he doesn't stubbornly roll away from the man coaxing him awake. He'd been reading at the foot end of his bed, but it didn't matter how he tried he couldn't focus on it, too far buried in the memory of Daryl's anger at him, trying to finish the puzzle with too few pieces. Sleep crept up on him, until eventually it seemed far more rewarding to push the book aside, forget his persistent over-thinking, and close his eyes.

Only now he had to open them, because Daryl wanted him for something.

He shifts up on an arm, bleary vision catching Daryl leaning over him, traced by the light of the open cell door. He checked first for urgency in the other man's features, and then for any lingering anger, but as was usual there was nothing there that gave him away.

Daryl doesn't wait for Rick to say something. "C'mon, get up."

_Rude,_ Rick thinks lightly, scoffing to show is displeasure at the command. He still shifts until he's sitting up, rubbing his eyes and stretching his neck in an arch. "Wha' time is it?" Rick asks. Daryl shifts back half a step at the sound of his voice, roughened and quiet from the lingering traces of sleep.

"Late."

He'd thought the light carving out Daryl's shape in his line of sight was dimmer than usual.

"Grab a jacket," Daryl tells him, already searching through the clothes piled on Rick's top bunk, "or you'll freeze yer ass off." He holds Ricks thick cotton jacket out to him, who takes it with the beginnings of confusion hesitating him.

"What're we doing?"

"Watch," is the only explanation Daryl gives him, and for the first several minutes Rick actually thought he'd been told to watch, but when he starts being lead outside with the guard tower in their direct path it starts to sink in exactly what Daryl meant.

The spring air's crisp, but it wont get truly cold until a few hours from now. Even the desert gets cold at night, with sand like snow. Despite this, Rick pulls his jacket tighter around him, follows in silence chillier than the air that misted his breath, and goes up the ladder first, each rusted rung like sandpaper against his palms, leaving stains like dead blood in the creases of his fingers.

Daryl slams the hatch shut, far too loud, the reverberations rocking his brain inside his skull, but before the waves of sound can crash and disappear he's already being pushed up against the closest wall, and Daryl's already trying to break into his jeans.

"Woah, wait, wait-"

But Daryl's determined. He already has Rick's fly open and is struggling with the button, pressing Rick's sudden and quiet eagerly growing arousal between them, before Rick figures out how words work.

"Daryl, no."

Daryl literally freezes all over, but the moment he remembers how to function he does it with gusto. He throws himself away from Rick with a look of absolute disgust, at himself or Rick or even both. "Should'a fucken' known I was right. I knew it. Must be hard picturin' yer wife with another man's dick in yer hand."

"What?"

"Hope you enjoyed yerself, 'cause it ain't ever happenin' again."

Rick crosses the space between them in two strides, blocking Daryl's way to the hatch all the same, wondering absently if he's going to get punched in the face today. Daryl looked that kind of volatile at the moment, the feral side long kept hidden now coming to the surface, and Rick makes sure not to touch him. "Daryl, what the _hell_ is going on?"

"Why the fuck did you kiss me, Rick. Why'd you do it twice. Why've we been doin' this for weeks."

"...I just..."

_How did this happen?_

"You don't even know." Daryl says, eyes like he could see through stone, hands shaking. "You have no idea what yer doin'."

"No," Rick whispers, feeling an unrecognizable panic start to seize his throat. _'It ain't happenin' again'_ is ringing between his ears, Daryl's violent glare burning into his face. Something he didn't even realise he wanted was slipping away right in front of him. "I just...wanted to kiss you again."

"Why."

"I...I don't know."

_He's pushing me,_ Rick realises, _he's pushing me to figure out what I want. What do I want? Fuck, what do I want!_

_...places your eyes told me you would burn away. My redwood heart said 'not today'..._

"_You_. I wanted to kiss _you_."

_He sees everything. He sees the all the things I don't want anybody to see. He sees the dark and ugly and violent things in me, too, he knows what I'm capable of and he knows what I've done and what I would do. He knows all of this, but he still wants me._

_I think he wants me... Doesn't he?_

"Daryl...why'd you kiss me back?"

The late afternoon sun was fading in, sparking on the dust swirling about the air they were breathing, as if somehow given life by the energy in the room, that tangible culmination of avoidance and attraction that Rick knew was coming. He knew, but he ignored it just the same as Daryl. They've ignored it for weeks.

This was inevitable. They weren't dealing with it until they had to, but now they had to, because that crack Rick thought he saw at noon was real. It was a real fracture and it was inside Daryl; Rick had put it there.

The light caught on the ends of Daryl's hair, too – caught on everything in fact, each small step bringing him closer to Rick with the pained splinters spearing his body so visible now, the set of his shoulders and the weak stride, the sleepless bruising and the thin shapeless lips. The syrupy light of late afternoon erased all of this, but Rick knew those splinters were there and now he had to rip them out.

Too much light was blinding, risks committing you to darkness, but Daryl's light came from the inside. It always had. Glowing copper hair and pale electrum skin and combustion blue eyes.

_He's so goddamn gorgeous. How is he so gorgeous._

"You're a better man than me, Daryl."

The disbelief that scrunched the man's features had Rick's heart crying out in agony.

"You still ain't learned. You got no idea how fucked up I am-"

"How can you say that to me? _Me?_" Rick laughs, but the sound wrenches from him with the painful force of his own self-disgust. "Carl killed a boy in cold blood and I can't even think about punishing him, 'cause he's just like me. I had to put a shovel in his hand just to save him. I gave up what we had, and-"

_Shit._

The saying was that it hits you like a tonne of bricks, but this felt like a damn landslide and Rick was caught in the aftermath, suffocating.

"...oh...Daryl, you didn't think...shit, Daryl, I never lied to you. It wasn't you, it was...I never stopped considering you as family. Christ, this whole time you thought..."

_He trusted me with so much. He trusted me not to turn my back on him._

_He thought I was tired of him._

Daryl bites his lips as he watches Rick realise, patterns starting to take shape. The cracks are spreading. Rick sees them there, fracturing into wires of light that crossed over Daryl's face and body, until piece by broken piece it came together.

"You wanna know why I kissed you back? 'Cause I'd been hopin' you would. I figured the alcohol was a good enough excuse the first time, but after that..."

"I asked you if you ever thought about that kiss," Rick whispers. "Did you?"

Daryl's mouth curves into that self-depreciating smile. Then the hunter repeats his own words back at him. "All the time," he says, and something of a revelation seems to ignite in Daryl as well. When Rick said those exact words, he'd said them because there was hardly another thing in his whole life he thought about more. When Daryl said them, it was a confession of a different sort, and it was for both of them.

He thinks now to Beth's words inked coldly on a page, the rejection that was never voiced aloud, and a part of him wants to tear the memory of those words away. Maybe Daryl could burn them away instead. Along with everything else that was dark and ugly and violent about him.

"If I asked you to kiss me right now, would you?" Rick asks, not entirely recognising the grainy sound of his own voice.

Daryl's mouth purses in restraint. "Depends on how you say it."

"Not why?" Why was always the question Daryl seemed to ask him.

"...I know why."

It wasn't necessary anymore.

"Please, _please _kiss me."

This time Daryl backs him up against the wall gently, takes Rick's face in his hands, and fixes their mouths together so sweetly Rick's heart cries out in agony _again_, his rust-stained fingers twisted uselessly in Daryl's jacket.

They went the whole night on watch curled up together on the floor, Daryl's jacket over their shoulders and Rick's strewn over their tangled legs, bundled up together to combat the cold. Rick wanted to reach out and grab Daryl's hand, or pull him closer with an arm slung over his waist, but even now, even knowing that this was so much more, he still couldn't muster the courage to take affection from Daryl that wasn't offered.

No matter how he longed to touch Daryl more, he settled for a simple kiss to the nape of the his neck, and pretending he didn't hear the other man's breath hitch he breathes in deep and closes his eyes. He can feel Daryl alive right next to him, and it's enough for tonight.

.:.

* * *

"_He got me into more trouble than he got me out of, but my brother's all I had,"_ Daryl says, _"then you already knew that."_

Rick lifts his eyes from the family photo he's plucked from the mantle of a tidy colonial house. He'd picked it up because for one terrible moment, he'd thought of Lori. The family was a man and wife and their young son between them. But even the placement of their first child it was impossible to miss the swell of the wife's pregnant belly. He didn't see any baby pictures, and thought it best not to dwell on what might've happened.

Daryl scoffs and takes the photo from his hands, testing the weight of the steel frame that was clearly cheaper than it looked. _"Man, don't tell me, all y'all family photos looked like this didn't they."_

"_What do you mean?"_

"_Fake backdrop, fake light, fake smiles."_

_Yes._

He doesn't have to say it aloud for Daryl to hear it. What had started spiteful becomes understanding when Daryl hands the photo back to him rather than tossing it like he'd first looked like he wanted to do. _"'s not how you take a family photo, man. They ain't s'posed to be forced. Probably why we never had any."_

A part of Rick wants to ask why Daryl has to make everything so morbid, and he puts the photo down on the mantle where it belongs, the dust outline of its shape not quite matching up to where Rick placed it.

"_I had one photo of my mom, though. I would'a kept that photo the rest of my life if my old man didn't throw it out with the rest of my shit. It was just her 'n me, when I was little. It was black 'n white, too, an' she wasn't even lookin' at the camera. She was lookin' at me."_

"_My favourite photo of Lori and Carl was the first day we brought him home from the hospital. I took the photo without either of them looking,"_ he confesses, then laughs, _"she hated it because the baby weight made her jeans look too tight."_

He knew now what Daryl was trying to say. There was no love in those photos where everybody's standing where they're told and smiling when they're told. Family was more than blood to Rick now. Perhaps to Daryl it always had been.

_She's not the only one who loved you._

Daryl gives him a look that's something like an apology, but Rick doesn't need it.

_She can't be the only one._

.:.

* * *

When Rick wakes up the next morning, it's with his face buried into Daryl's bare neck, breathing in the scent of his skin. The jackets had separated during the night, leaving one particularly cold patch of skin where his shirt had ridden up during his restless shifting, but beyond that the rest of him was absolutely burning. Pleasantly enough, he found he was burning from more than just their body heat.

He leans back to see, notices how Daryl's longer hair is swept away from where Rick's face had been, and wonders if he'd been the one to do that or Daryl. While he was sleeping, the calm affecting Daryl's face could very near erase the anger held there just yesterday. Just looking at his obscured profile in the filtering dawn, Rick felt the rewarding nervous warmth spilling behind his ribs, seeping into the rest of his body like static in the blood.

He lifts his hand from between them where it lay nestled in the warm cove of Daryl's spine, he brings it up to trace through the errant strands that had flicked over Daryl's face overnight, brushing them away.

Daryl stirs, and at the soft groan he makes, Rick licks his lips.

When Daryl does wake, it's to Rick's mouth mapping out the terrain of his neck, an arm around his waist, and fingers slipped into his jeans toying with his pubic curls.

Rick waits until the other man grunts out his name, shifts back so Daryl can turn just far enough to see him, then brings his hand around Daryl's firming flesh. Sleepy eyes widen, latched onto Rick's face in surprise, and Rick offers a gentle smile to the hunter before he brushes their lips together. Daryl's the one who draws him closer, who fiddles with his jeans and kicks them and the jackets down somewhere by their ankles, but Rick's the one who curls his body up as tightly as he can behind Daryl, who strokes over the ripples of gooseflesh over his cold skin, and who watches Daryl's slackened face and hears his throaty call of release.

It's Rick who pulls Daryl into the gentle, languid kiss afterwards.

.:.

* * *

Rick couldn't explain to you why he did it if you gave him all the time in the world to come up with an answer.

Maybe it was the fresh memory of this thing with him and Daryl transcending what it was and forecasting what it could be, and all with the gentle kiss Daryl laid on Rick's lips. There was the realisation of just what Daryl meant to him now that they had established that this was more, that it was not just one of them pining for the other.

He couldn't forget what Daryl looked like when he came undone under Rick's hand. He doubts he ever could, but even if it was just for a moment he might be able to get some actual work done.

Then Daryl himself squashes that forced hope and rewards another.

Rick was working, again without Carl, harvesting some of the ripe results of his constant tendering, when the rumble of the bike turns his veins to ice, an unpleasant dread licking down his back. He's tossing the basket to the ground and racing off toward the gates to catch the group, to catch Daryl, before he considers what he must look like.

He's a mess, streaked with dirt and sweat, tangled hair and tattered clothes, quite possibly a wild look in his eye that he doubts any but Daryl would comprehend.

He forgot there was supposed to be another run today.

Daryl spots him straight away, stops the bike in front of the car and waits for him. _He's concerned,_ Rick thinks, seeing the increasingly familiar downturn of his expression. _Concerned for me,_ he concludes, and the blunt affection impacts against his lungs. Breathless, he reaches for the handlebar of Daryl's bike, holding onto it in his tenuous grip as though it was enough to keep it still, like his fingers could chain it.

"Rick," Daryl murmurs, the bike still rumbling, his voice almost lost in the ugly guttural sound. "What's wrong?"

"Stay."

"What? Stay, why?"

_I don't know. Just stay with me._

He didn't need to stay behind the fences, 'lock out the world' as he'd accused Rick of doing, but Rick wasn't blind to the weariness Daryl carried with him after too much death. Daryl pushed himself beyond what he was capable of doing.

But that wasn't why. Picking tomatoes wasn't going to mend Daryl the way it did for Rick, it wasn't going to soothe the restlessness the way it did for his son.

"I need help. In the garden," Rick insists anyway, because anything was better than nothing, and he fears he's stared too long without an answer anyway.

Daryl doesn't buy it. "What's the real reason."

"I want you here," he confesses, surprised at himself for how quickly he gives in.

Daryl, without hesitation, turns the key in the bike's ignition, and in leaning into Rick he says "you know I can't stay back every time." He climbs off the bike anyway, then moves to rap his knuckles on the passenger side door. "Y'all know the way, I got other business here. Take care of yerselves out there."

Rick can suddenly breathe again.

.:.

* * *

Months later, they're sitting together by Rick's flourishing garden, and they're not alone. Daryl's got Judith hoisted up onto her feet, steadying her every other step with a gentle grip on her arms. She's babbling at the cabbage butterflies tormenting the patch, and Daryl eventually has to lift up onto his knees to follow her, still guiding her uneasy steps with his large hands below her arms, shuffling behind her and getting grass and dirt stains in the denim that Carol will surely complain about. Rick is smiling, half reclined back in the grass, watching Daryl stoop to rest his bristly chin on Judith's shoulder. It entices a giggle from his daughter and a fond laugh from himself.

"What's this?" Daryl asks Judith, letting go of one of her arms and turning her attention when he points to one of the butterflies that had landed.

"Flowah," Judith mumbles, reaches for what they think is the butterfly at first, but even after it's flitted away, startled by the incoming hand, she keeps reaching. She grabs a purple wildflower by its stem, and Daryl takes her wrist between his fingers, tugging it back.

"If ya pick it, it'll die." Judith flops onto her rear with a chiming giggle, pokes the flower in its golden pollen centre. "You wanna keep it? We'll come out here every day. We'll sit down an' watch it grow."

The click of a shutter disturbs them, and Daryl picks his head up from next to Judith with the graceful reflexes that reminded Rick of a wild cat. Crouched in the grass several feet away, Glenn is grinning behind his new Polaroid camera, which he lowers quickly to take the print. "Aww, you guys are like one big happy family," he comments, ignoring Daryl fast approaching. "Even got Carl in the background."

True enough, Carl was playing catch in the distance, waiting for Patrick to retrieve the ball from a particularly hard throw, his hip cocked out and his head tipped back to watch the sky. He's in the background of the photo when Daryl snatches it, still developing, from Glenn's fingers.

Rick's forcing himself upright too, half an eye on his daughter who's now crawling around in the grass in wonder, and comes to Daryl's side. It's a nice photo, but the grin on his profile is too wide and his angle itself is kind of strange. He's tempted to cut himself out of it, keep just his kids and Daryl in the picture, but he can't even bear taking it from the other man.

Anyway, Daryl certainly doesn't look like he's about to give it up any time soon.

The hunter casts Glenn an odd look and goes back to Judy with the photo still in his hand. Rick watches him show it to the little girl before tucking it into his back pocket.

He forgets about the photo for so long, that when he next sees it he's on the hunt for a pencil and praying Daryl has stashed one somewhere. The man had developed a habit of squirreling away odds and ends that ran out quick, presenting them to Rick whenever he couldn't find one. He might've just asked Daryl for it, but they weren't talking that day.

They weren't really trying to keep it a secret what they were, it's just how it turned out. They were both so private, and both quite aware of Carl's wilful ignorance to what the two of them did together. He never called either of them out on it, but he knew, watched them sometimes in such a way Rick wasn't ready to ask him about. Just with anything some people caught on much quicker than others, but a few homophobic comments from one of the old Woodsbury folk later and Daryl seemed to figure the appropriate response was shutting Rick out.

So Rick figured he'd find a pencil his own damn self.

He came across the photo by accident, stuffed between the cover and front page of an empty journal, folded in half and a little crinkled beyond that.

When Rick unfolds it, he gets the shock of seeing that photo again after so many months forgetting it even existed and that Daryl had it, scratched and crinkled and worn at the edges. Daryl must've carried that photo on him for a time, but now it was wedged carefully in a place where it could get damaged no further.

Rick stares at the photo in his hands, sitting on the edge of Daryl's bunk and feeling the familiar pressure of strong emotion in the corners of his eyes and deep in his chest, and keeps staring for so long that Daryl comes across him like that.

"Rick?" Daryl calls for him softly, takes Judith off his hip and ushers her along, the toddler scampering off down the other end of the cellblock no doubt into someone's arms. Daryl comes and sits beside him, spotting for the first time what exactly is in his hand. "Rick..."

"I love you."

Rick doesn't dare look away from the photo, but he knows the kind of smile Daryl's giving him even if some part of him still doubts. Daryl's hand knots in his hair, pulls him close and brushes a dry kiss against the high of his cheekbone, feather soft. Fingertips stroke at his scalp and Daryl tucks himself against Rick's side however he'll fit.

Daryl's lips brush the shell of his ear, and in a whisper as soft as the kiss that had slid from his cheek like the brush of a butterfly wing, he says it for the very first time. "I love you."

**End.**

* * *

**A/N:** And so this pointless story comes to a close. Hope it was worth reading anyway!

The title Hyperion was taken from the name of the tallest Redwood to my own knowledge (I may be wrong) but Hyperion was also a titan, and his children Helios, Selene, and Eos were hence used as chapter titles in this story as symbolic for Day, Night, and Dawn.

I originally wrote it to test myself, because Sapien is ridiculously long, and from the look of it, a lot of my unpublished WIPs aren't any different. This still ended up cutting at over 20k. I literally started it like a test, too. I picked three random words, brainstormed for a few minutes, and huzzah, a story! (kinda). The result? Totally proved to myself I can write something other than Sapien (I'm blatantly ignoring any similarities that came from writing both fics at once).

Anyway, the next fic actually has a plot, who'da thunk?


End file.
